Excerpt from The Dental Columbian, 1938

Dentistry in the past twenty years has made very rapid progress. To substantiate this statement one may cite many examples. More important, however, than any tangible example which may have contributed to this progress is the ability of the present day dental graduate to cope with the problems of dentistry. One may then reasonably ask why the graduate of to-day is better prepared to serve society in the capacity of a dentist than a graduate of twenty years ago.

This I feel, may be attributed to the gradual increase in scholastic requirements of candidates entering dental schools and to the increase in the standards of courses of study within the dental schools. The result of this improved teaching is a dentist who is able to View dentistry from an increasingly wider horizon, who with his improved foundation is capable of conducting his practice on a higher plane, and who with his fundamental training in the basic sciences is capable not only of seeing the vast unsolved problems in dentistry, but also of doing real research in helping to solve them.

It has been my very great privilege to have been so situated in this rapid progress as to be able to watch it closely, to observe the type and the training of the men who have passed through the dental schools year after year. Each year there have been improvements in the quality of the dental student and in his ability to comprehend and absorb not only more but more complex material. He has become more critical, more anxious to understand fundamentals and, because of this trend, a very important step in dental training has been made.

This year's class, 1938, is the first of which a thesis has been required. It is hoped that-for each thesis some original work will have been done. If so the student will have derived great benefit, not simply because he will have made a real contribution but because he will have learned from short exposure to research methods to be accurate, thorough, and open minded, yet skeptical and analytical. These are very important attributes of a dental practitioner and of the man who will guide dentistry in the future.

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