D espite having a huge impact on your overall health, dentistry is uniquely separate from the rest of medicine. Your dentist never checks your joint reflexes, and your family doctor won’t know what to do if you have gingivitis. The story of how this happened is filled with poor timing and petty office drama. In the early 1800s, there was no formal training to practice dentistry. Anyone who could pull a tooth could set up shop and call themselves a dentist. Around this time, a Baltimore surgeon named Dr. Chapin Harris developed an interest in the field. The more he learned about dentistry, the more Harris realized it was connected to medicine. He went to the physicians at the University of Maryland (U of M) and suggested adding a dental program to the medical school. The physicians responded by telling Harris, “The subject of dentistry is of little consequence.” This curt response became known as the Historic Rebuff. Why were the physicians at the University of Maryland so dismissive to dentistry? It wasn’t because they didn’t care about teeth. Dr. Harris had unwittingly made his proposal during a huge struggle amongst the U of M faculty. The board of trustees had recently taken power The Historic Rebuff HOW WORKPLACE DRAMA CREATED DENTISTRY
away from the faculty and started appointing their own people. One of these people was Dr. Henry Willis Baxley.
Baxley was a professor of anatomy at U of M with an interest in dentistry. Baxley supported Harris’ proposal, but, unfortunately for Harris, Baxley had also been appointed the chief of anatomy by the trustees. The rest of the faculty saw Baxley as a traitor, so the physicians were probably so quick to rebuff Harris’ proposal because of Baxley’s support. Far from deterred, Harris, Baxley, and many other dentists in Maryland banded together and established the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery in 1840. This was the first dental school in the United States, and it quickly became the epicenter of the American dental movement. The American Society of Dental Surgeons and the American Journal of Dental Science were established soon afterward, further cementig dentistry as a unique field.
Through one act of spite, the Historic Rebuff, dentistry emerged as we know it today as a separate entity from the rest of medicine.
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