Odontogram Dental Ledger Gold Inlay X-Ray NYC 1916 Porcelain Amalgam Bridge
$ 11.09
Description
Odontogram Dental Ledger Gold Inlay X-Ray NYC 1916 Porcelain Amalgam Bridge. The physical condition of the card reflects its age and use. This vintage dental record from 1916 and 1917 is a combination patient account card and odontogram, offering a detailed glimpse into early twentieth-century restorative dentistry and private practice record-keeping. The card served both as a clinical tooth chart and a financial ledger, with handwritten entries documenting a series of dental procedures and their associated costs over a period of several months. The odontogram, or tooth chart, is a central feature of the card, and while the specific markings are not fully visible in the image, the surrounding treatment notes provide clear evidence of the work performed, including references to gold fillings, gold inlays, porcelain inlays, amalgam restorations, temporary fillings, and root fillings. These entries reflect the period’s emphasis on durable, high-quality restorative materials and the growing sophistication of private dental practice. The ledger portion records payments and balances, offering insight into the financial side of early dentistry and the cost of procedures such as crowns, bridgework, jacket crowns, and X-rays, which was still a relatively new diagnostic tool at the time. The card is from the professional office archive of a dentist, and while the patient’s name and specific address are present, they are best described in general historical terms, such as a New York City residence. The record shows evidence of multiple visits and a course of treatment that likely involved both routine maintenance and more involved restorative work. The physical condition of the card reflects its age and use. It has been folded along its original creases and shows signs of brittleness toward the edges, with light toning, edge wear, and minor staining consistent with long-term storage in a professional file. The handwritten entries are legible and appear to be in period ink, with some notations in pencil. This item will be of strong interest to collectors of medical and dental ephemera, researchers of early twentieth-century healthcare practices, and genealogists tracing family medical history. It is a tangible artifact of the era before modern dental insurance and standardized record-keeping, when a patient’s entire treatment and payment history was tracked by hand on a single card. The combination of clinical data and financial accounting makes this a particularly rich document for understanding the business and practice of dentistry in the 1910s. PLEASE NOTE: This item may be shipped according to how it was originally folded.
