DENTAL SCHOOL

September 1957: orientation program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine. The setting was a large lecture hall filled with 120 young, eager, very impressionable neophytes, who had only a vague idea of the task ahead. The composite (a pun in today's dental nomenclature) picture was that of a somber-faced group of men (plus two women!) awaiting the first official interchange between faculty and my new classmates. We were to be indoctrinated in the meaning of the exalted word professional, along with all its incumbent obligations, such as being a continual student throughout life, always dressing properly, and exhibiting personal behavior reflective of our new status in the esteemed world of respectable professions. The dean did introduce a moment of levity, saying that dental students were "the apple of every single girl's eye in Philadelphia," because unlike the medical and veterinary students, our lives would be enhanced by a work schedule that had us home in time for dinner every day, and that we would rarely be interrupted by house calls or late-hour hospital visits. In addition, we would have the ability to provide an excellent income plus gain instant social status wherever we went.

The lecture was well received, and I recall walking out of the building toward my rooming house dorm feeling more than a little bit inflated. I was a professional student, and my life is now taking me to high place of self respect. I was a member of an elite group. I had made a giant leap from my four undergraduate years at Tufts College (now University), where, as a commuting student, I spent three hours of every school day traveling between my home in Roxbury and the campus in Medford Massachusetts ... one street car, two subway trains, and one trackless trolley ... each way. Now the dean's message was eagerly received, especially the "apple" part.

That first weekend I went with a group of new friends to downtown Philadelphia to have a brew or two and just get to know each other, exchanging thoughts about the coming year as well as diminishing any anxiety about the difficult program which we all faced. As a few young woman passed by we would remember the "apple" and in a not too quiet voice bandy about a few dental terms that might serve as verbal bait to get us noticed, and perhaps even spark a bit of interest. I remember distinctly throwing out the word "prosthetics" which I saw in the first semester's schedule, realizing that it sounded impressive, even though I had no idea what a prosthesis was. That moment was an epiphany. I suddenly realized that I would be able to fit a bit of light-heartedness into the implementation of my professional career, and yet still remain a continual student. Although our attempt to impress any of the Philly lassies was unsuccessful, we had a fun evening, and were ready for our first lecture on Monday morning. We would survive.

The tone of the first few weeks of my freshman year was one of muted self-assurance. We were neophytes in a professional school, one that would enable us to achieve a highly respected as well as a comfortable financial status in life. We would be part of a medical community that, pre-governmental regulations and pre-insurance dependency, was held in very high esteem. I was so aware of my new place on the cusp (pun intended) of a wonderful life that I worked very hard and, as a result, received the best grades of my life in my first semester, studying longer and more focused than I ever thought possible. I was going to make it! Serious, serious, serious. By the middle of the second semester, with the increasing belief that a sophomore year lay clearly ahead, we all began to feel a bit more at ease. Translated: fun time could be interspersed. In a lab class where our task was to carve teeth to a perfect scale from wax blocks, I kept my finished products in an empty Bufferin jar (which was part of my supplies and equipment inventory). At the end of one lab session I showed the bottle to the instructor, and without hesitation stated that I used this storage method because, "the course gave me a headache." I was doing well at the time, which energized me. The instructor managed a slow smile and even a bit of a laugh. Success! There was hope for a smile or even a chuckle in that starched-white environment!

The laboratory technique classes were designed to acquaint us with dental materials and their eventual application in treating real people. Pre-clinical courses allowed us to become acquainted with methodology and then to begin to hone our skills In one of our first prosthetic exercises our objective was to learn to take a wax impression of an object, and then create a duplicate in dental stone. The Benjamin Franklin 50 cent piece was chosen for both its size and its crisp carving on the obverse side. Our exercise consisted if wrapping the edge of the coin in wax and then flowing the properly mixed water and powder slurry onto the coin. When the stone had set, we removed the wax border and examined the cast for consistency and clarity. I remember saying to my nearby classmates that here we were into our second week of dental school, and they were already teaching us to make money!

One popular dental material produced an ironic situation. The cost of gold was approximately 36 dollars an ounce, and we were allowed to keep any scraps of the metal that remained after we had cast our crowns and inlays. Since our dental casting gold was 18 carats, in today's market the value of those remnants has increased forty-fold. Many dental students in that era fashioned the scrap gold into charms for use as gifts for friends and family or to create a bracelet for their ladies, and almost every student carved a molar in wax and then cast a gold tooth as a reminder of their early clinical skills. We had precious little money, but plenty of gold!

During our first two years some of the courses, such as anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, and cytology were taught at the medical school, which was located just a few blocks away. Some of that school's faculty considered the dental students to be a step or two beneath their own students, and subsequently treated us with more than just a small bit of condescension. The professor who was in charge of the Human Anatomy class was unashamedly the leader of the pack. Gross anatomy is a difficult enough subject without being taught by a person who sneered at almost every question asked by an anxious student. We had a preview of the year ahead when on the first day he ambled to the blackboard and wrote the word LABORATORY, and with a smile on his face doctored (pun intended) it to read LABOR/ORATORY, saying that he wanted a lot of the first part, and none of the second. His dislike of us was so evident, that he concocted a scheme at the end of the first semester which was designed to unnerve everyone. The final exam involved identification of parts of the entire body. Throughout the course we had worked in dissection teams of four students per cadaver, in a lab with thirty tables. Before the test day each student was charged with placing a numbered paper tag on one body part. Thus, although each group of four would know what structure their tags represented, the other 116 in the lab were unknown. The exam would consist of each student moving from table to table, and writing down the names of the structures on the exam sheet. Since Penn operated on an honor system (one...