THUMB-SUCKING.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19420, 31 August 1926, Page 9

THUMB-SUCKING.

ALLEGED BAR TO BEAUTY. A DENTIST'S EXPERIMENTS. NEW YORK, Aug. 20. The beauty of the human face is determined in the first six months of life. This theory was propounded by Dr. Stanley Wilkinson, a Melbourne dentist, in a lecture before the First International Orthodentic Congress here. Detailing experiments upon Melbourne babies, in the course of which he took impressions of infant's jaws and faces from the age of seven days to six months, he said: " Even a slight sucking of the thumb in the first six momns directly inhibits the normal growth. The lower jaw during the first six months gets a much accelerated growth of the mandible (lower jaw bones), as opposed to the upper jaw. It is possible that the weak and receding chins, marring facial beauty, are usually the result of thumbsucking in the first six months." Dr. Wilkinson has visited the leading dental colleges of America, Canada, England, and in seven South American countries, He says that ho saw great progress in dental science everywhere. Teeth were much the same the world over, Dr. Wilkinson said, but Americans took the best care of them. England excelled all in pure dental science, and America in technique, while Australia had an advantage in perspective on both. He was proud of Australia's standing.