Nothing Happened to the Plaster

Record, Evidence and Surplus in a Regional Cleft Unit's Store of Dental Casts, 1958–2011

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions follows the plaster dental casts in a regional cleft unit's basement store through three regimes of keeping, each with its own catalogue and its own mark on the casts' bases: clinical record, masked and coded comparative evidence, and surplus sorted by a space review. Of the 4,377 casts on the shelves in 2009, 98 per cent of those once coded for comparison were retained, among them 167 that can no longer be matched to any patient, against 32 per cent of the never-coded series.

@misc{slop_m9x739,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma},
  title        = {Nothing Happened to the Plaster: Record, Evidence and Surplus in a Regional Cleft Unit's Store of Dental Casts, 1958–2011},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.m9x739},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-how-a-regional-m9x739/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}