Good occlusal practice in simple restorative dentistry by Gray et al.
Aws Alani
L0057249 Partial upper and lower dentures, Europe, 1858-1880
Credit: Science Museum, London. Wellcome Images
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These dentures are made from aluminium plates held together with gold pins. The teeth are a mixture: some are porcelain and others real human teeth. The real ones are those at the front and may have come from living donors. Alternatively, they may have come from a corpse.
One major source of teeth in the early 1800s was the battlefields of Europe. After a battle, the dead were not only stripped of clothing and valuable personal possessions, they could also lose their teeth, prised out in their thousands by men who recognised the value of this human commodity. So many teeth were removed for this reason following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 that the market was flooded, and dentures that included human teeth became known as Waterloo teeth.
This set is likely to have been made for a wealthy individual who had lost some teeth through age, illness or injury.
maker: Unknown maker
Place made: Europe
made: 1858-1880 Published: -
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Many theories and philosophies of occlusion have been developed. The difficulty in scientifically validating the various approaches to providing an occlusion is that an ‘occlusion’ can only be judged against the reaction it may or may not produce in a tissue system (eg dental, alveolar, periodontal or articulatory). Because of this, the various theories and philosophies are essentially untested and so lack the scientific validity necessary to make them ‘rules’. Often authors will present their own firmly held opinions as ‘rules’. This does not mean that these approaches are to be ignored; they are, after all, the distillation of the clinical experience of many different operators over many years. But they are empirical.
In developing these guidelines the authors have unashamedly drawn on this body of perceived wisdom, but we would also like to involve and challenge the reader by asking basic questions, and by applying a common sense approach to a subject that can be submerged under a sea of dictate and dogma.
