Then G.V. Black’s “extension for prevention” meant cutting out a lot of sound tooth structure around actual decay 'just to be sure'. Much more aggressive than today’s minimal-intervention approach. And a whole generation got their teeth destroyed by giant amalgam fillings.
— Skopós (@Skops1926805) September 12, 2026
Greene Vardiman Black, 1836–1915, was an American dentist and academic. He was one of the founders of modern dentistry in the United States. He is also known as the father of operative dentistry.
also known for his principles of tooth preparations, in which he outlines the proper methods to prepare teeth for fillings. These cavity preparations used principles of engineering and material sciences to maximize strength and retention of the amalgam filling and minimize fractures as well as tooth anatomy, to minimize pulp exposure.[4] The phrase, "extension for prevention," is still famous in the dental community today and represents Black's idea that dentists should incorporate more grooves and pits than those currently exhibiting decay as a preventive measure against those grooves and pits developing tooth decay [which is malnourishment or undernourishment] in the future, although today ideas have changed and focus much more on minimal intervention. Black published his concepts and ideals in his text Manual of Operative Dentistry in 1896.
Got massive craters in your tooth row, jawline? Thank GV Black.
from Sama Hoole,
Two brothers from the same croft on the Isle of Lewis, photographed in the 1930s, and the one on the right had discovered the shop. Weston Price was an American dentist who spent the decade before the war sailing to the last places on earth the modern diet had not reached, to look in people's mouths. The Outer Hebrides was one of them. Crofters in thatched houses black with peat smoke, living on oats and fish and the liver of the cod, mutton off the hill, milk from the house cow, and not a bag of sugar between them. Their teeth were straight, tight, and without a single cavity, in a place that had never seen a dentist. Then the boat started calling. White flour, sugar, jam, tinned meat, sweets for the children, all of it shipped in from Glasgow, and the crofts nearest the harbour took to it first. The brothers in the photograph are the result. One kept eating what the island had always eaten. The other had moved onto the food that came in a packet, and his mouth had fallen apart in a few years: rampant decay, teeth gone, and the face already starting to pinch and narrow around a jaw that had stopped being fed. Same parents. Same house. Same rain, same peat, same island, same blood. One variable, and it is standing in the photograph with its mouth open. We were later told all of this was genetics. Bad teeth run in families. Some people are just prone. Price stood on a hundred shorelines with a camera and watched the same thing happen in the same generation everywhere the flour and sugar landed, and the profession he belonged to buried the book. Ninety years later a child in Britain is more likely to go into hospital for tooth extraction than for anything else, and the sweet aisle is the first thing you see in the shop. The brother on the left is what you look like on the old food. The brother on the right is what the boat did.The boat still comes in. It just has a loyalty card now.
