Abstract

Dental ethics is a specialised branch of dentistry addressing ethical issues in dental practice. However, dental ethics and diversity are thought to be at odds within the practice of dentistry. Dentistry centres on ethical clinical practices which assume dental ethics are both value neutral and singular with no need for diverse perspectives. Dental ethics are thought to be static, and yet, they are dynamic and problematic in terms of values in dentistry: cosmetic dentistry and its aim for a white smile and the dentist as a clinician, businessperson when there are glaring oral health disparities in communities. In this paper, we use the artefact of George Washington’s complete dentures to tell an alternative story of dentistry that demonstrates just how ethics and diversity are relevant to dentistry. As two dental educators and social scientists, we bring an interdisciplinary praxis to problematise dental ethics and reframe it through a diversity lens. Instead of having a monolithic discourse of dental ethics, we invite critical reflectivity to decentre white, Eurocentric bioethics. Using the implosion method, we deconstruct this dental object to connect it with global history, centring key ethical dilemmas often missed in dental ethics: settler colonialism, biopolitics, whiteness, power and racial capitalism. Every country has its own myth-making, and part of US oral health lore is this complete denture from the country’s first president. The denture is problematic because it is possibly composed of teeth from enslaved African people. Unnamed African people are removed from history, and yet their teeth are national lore. As an object, the denture is not a mere artefact of history, but is celebrated to show a nation’s founding father’s connection to a profession. To celebrate the denture without appreciating these ethical dilemmas is to miss the importance of critically engaging history and context in both oral health practice and dental education.