Dowry dentures: a toothless tradition

Some women from the Acadian region of Canada traditionally remove their teeth in order to receive dentures as a wedding gift. The practice, now called prenuptial tooth extraction, was just defined in dental literature for the first time. Because of the way the study was conducted, we do not know how long this practice has existed, or if it is still going on today.

Professor Sara Gordon first came across the practice while working as a dentist in Nova Scotia in the 1990s. “A young lady came in and had a toothache, and wanted me to take out all of her teeth,” Gordon recalls. “And she had almost nothing wrong with her teeth… but she told me she wanted to get them out because the young women in her community had their teeth out when they were getting married.”

Now a professor of dentistry at the University of Illinois, Gordon decided to see if she was the only person who had come across this strange practice. She sent out a survey to all registered dentists in the Acadian region of Canada, and received responses from 90. Of them, eight had been asked to perform prenuptial extractions. A further nine had heard of the practice, but had never been asked to take out teeth.

Only one other literary record exists in a memoir written by artist Jori Smith in 1930. “When a girl was about to marry, her few remaining teeth would routinely be pulled out, and, as a wedding present, she would be given a set of false teeth. If, by some rare stroke of fortune, the future bride’s teeth were still healthy, they would be removed anyway, so great was the prestige of store-bought teeth.”

Removing perfectly healthy teeth is not limited to Canada. Infant oral mutilation (IOM) takes place in at least nine African countries, including Kenya and Tanzania. Children between the ages of four and six are taken to a traditional healer for the removal of so-called “tooth worms”, which are believed to cause sickness, diarrhea or fever. The children’s still-developing lower canine teeth are gouged or burned out, usually without sterile tools. Removing teeth in this way can lead to infection and longer term dental issues such as overcrowding.

Rosemary Longhurst, a member of the Dentaid group on IOM, wants to see more awareness of the practice both in African countries and in the UK. “It is seen in this country in immigrants,” says Longhurst. “They have the results of IOM.” Consequently, dentists need to know how to recognise a child who has undergone IOM, and learn to prevent the long-term problems that result from it.

Longhurst said that she heard of women having their teeth out at a young age in the East of England when she owned a dental surgery there in the 1980s. Supposedly it was to save them the expense of dental work in later life. There do not seem to be any studies confirming this, although it is possible prenuptial extraction took place in late 19th and early 20th century England.

Gordon suspects that prenuptial tooth extraction is now either extremely rare, or no longer performed in Canada. One dentist in her survey commented that he had campaigned throughout his career to stop the tradition in his area, while another said that her mother and aunts had had their teeth removed when they were young.