“Civilization Is Based upon the Stability of Molars”

English dentists perusing the August 1918 edition of The Dental Record must have applauded the claim made in a book review by Dorothy Richardson that “Civilization is based upon the stability of molars.”¹ For these dentists, “civilization” inevitably meant Western civilization, and more specifically, English civilization, which within recent memory had proven its worth by laying claim to one-fifth of the world's lands and one-quarter of its people (MacDonald 2).² Although the vast majority of these people had yet to be convinced that maintaining strong, clean teeth should be an individual and national priority, to dentists it was abundantly clear that “stable molars” should be one of the Empire's central concerns.³ Linking the faltering cause of stable molars to the proven cause of British imperial civilization, Richardson's comment in the 1918 book review succinctly foregrounds early twentieth-century assumptions about the foundational relationship between the body and the body politic. Exploring this relationship through Richardson's writings about teeth promises to unite analysis of a curious, unwritten chapter in English medical science with a similarly curious, unwritten chapter in Richardson's literary record.