(See front cover)
The American Dental Association was scheduled to meet in Oakland. Calif, last month. For their convention that association of proud professional men decided that they needed no less than 3.000 hotel rooms. 50.000 sq. ft. of space for clinics and exhibits, an assembly hall to hold at least 1,000 persons at a time. Oakland had the space, but not the sleeping quarters. Hence Oakland hotelkeepers and merchants lost the business which 8,000 dentists created when they met across the bay in San Francisco last week.
San Francisco took the visiting dentists at their face value, bedecked the city with lavender & white bunting (A. D. A. colors), supplied special free trips to the two great bridges being constructed across San Francisco Harbor. The Glad Tiding Temple Bible Institute's motorized loudspeaker serenaded the dentists with the refrain: "Oh, when we all pull together, together, together, how happy we will be." At the dentists' main banquet the St. Francis Hotel presented a huge confection in the shape of a full denture, cookies shaped like molars.
Dentists smiled at such punning, wished it would stop. As he was about to turn over A. D. A.'s presidency to Dr. Leroy Matthew Simpson ('"Roy") Miner of Boston last week, Dr. George Ben Winter, St. Louis exodontist (specialist in tooth pulling), observed that only a hundred years ago all U. S. dentists were "drawn from the ranks of the artisans, goldsmiths, blacksmiths and barbers." Since then dentists have improved in knowledge, skill and culture. Yet so halting has been their social progress that an official A. D. A. committee last week was obliged to report: ''Public esteem for the profession of dentistry is not as high as that of other professions."
Manfully dentists last week strove to improve their status. Dr. Miner, their new president, who is both Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Medical Dentistry, told them: "Not until diagnosis becomes the foundation on which the whole structure of dentistry is built can it lay claim to be a learned profession or an important branch of the great art and science of healing." As tooth-menders, most dentists realize that they are little more than unrespected artisans working on the fringe of health. As preventers of dental disease, they run the risk of becoming doctors' handymen, in a class with physiotherapists, roentgenologists, pathologists and urinoscopists.