Before Pepsodent appeared, only 7 percent of Americans had a tube of toothpaste in their medicine chests. A decade after Hopkins’s ad campaign went nationwide, that number had jumped to 65 percent.2.12 By the end of World War II, the military downgraded concerns about recruits’ teeth because so many soldiers were brushing every day.
Another strange reporting detail: It’s actually incredibly hard to find research about the history of toothbrushing in the United States. To report this chapter, I tracked down a couple of historians who had studied the public health of dental hygiene - but there’s almost nothing definitive on the subject.
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