Columbia University School of Dental and Oral Surgery - Dental Columbian Yearbook (New York, NY)

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. . . super glazed Senior Class Once upon a time there gathered in an amphitheater a group of over-awed people who were about to enter a new profession. The exact date was January 3, 1944; the place was the School of Dental and Oral Surgery. A hush fell across the room as a dignified man entered and proceeded to welcome the group to the school. Memory fails me as to the exact words that were spoken but that makes little difference. The importance of the event was that it was the first official meeting of the class of June 1947. We plunged into the difficult task of digest- ing Gray ' s Anatomy, Bailey ' s Histology, and trying to associate our classmates ' names with their faces. The names were soon straightened out, but I doubt if anyone has completely straightened out the rest. With the aid of fre- quent demonstrations, we dissected, memorized and were subjected to many shirt-cuff and pencil arterial maps, the result being a maze of lines and dots of which no one, not even the artist, had any inkling of the meaning. The big topic of conversation for the next few weeks was the immediate marriage of Leo Golub. Leo took that Navy V-12 marriage re- striction literally and picked the very first oppor- tunity to get hitched immediately after entering professional school. We had our first class elec- tion, and Ched Jurka was named president and thereafter rested on his political laurels and remained the elder statesman. The A. S. T. P. and V-12 boys began their weekly drill sessions and the most pressing problem at that moment was our impatience while awaiting the arrival of the midshipman uniforms. That Navy group was impressive, with the transfers from other units in bell-bottoms, and the newcomers in civilian clothes. But uniform trouble was not the only problem that faced this valiant group. There was a little course called Dental Anatomy which had, as part of the requirements, the task of carving a set of teeth from wax blocks. The number of wax teeth out on 168th Street, where they were tossed by the students who happened to compare theirs with the teeth carved by Joe Thomson, must have been tremendous. But life as a freshman wasn ' t too bad. We were told how to do this and that by those ever present sophomores; we were mellow and be- yond at a class beer party and helped the Physi- ology Department celebrate its good fortune in finally getting rid of us with a rousing party at the Psi Omega house. But with the coming of October we were no longer neophytes. The memo- ries of the horrors of first year exams had passed, and we looked ahead to the beginning of our study of actual dental subjects which up to this time had been limited to those wax teeth. Gentlemen and ladies, this is a tooth ! We were dentists of the first degree. They handed us a myriad of instruments and told us to memo- rize the numbers. They put a handpiece in our hands and told us how to drill an extracted tooth that was held in a vise. That was fun ' til they began that mesio-lingual and bucco-occlusal routine. We are still looking for the mesio-linguo- axial cavo-surface angle! Yet, they did not give our gray matter a chance to unlax! They also dug up a little chore called prosthetics. You made a set of false teeth (pardon, dentures) from a set of master metal models. If our pa- tients could have seen us then they would have preferred to have all their teeth removed and just go without. The law of averages did not hold in the taking of ridge impressions. We mixed plaster with such gusto, and in such abundance, that Dr. Junemann was forced to repeat time and again: Want a derby hat? It will never be known how many of us felt tempted to reply that 27

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Class of ' 47 OFFICERS President — Jesse W. Field Vice President — Herman I. Scheiner Secretary-Treasurer — Irving Rifkin

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he didn ' t have to go to all that trouble, since that homberg of his would suffice, but there were many. But our associations with Dr. Junemann did not end with these repartees. There was an- other course given in second year called Dental Materials which deals with the physical, chemi- cal, and biological characteristics of all the sub- stances used in dentistry. On the final exam there was a question which read as follows — You and a friend are shipwrecked on a desert island and your friend has lost his upper denture. Describe how you would make him a new one. The editors of the year book approached Dr. Junemann as to the possibilities of printing the more hilarious answers to this problem. Unfor- tunately the papers have long since been de- stroyed, but Dr. Junemann was able to throw some light on the subject. One of our classmates used monkey teeth and half a dozen had vulcan- izers float ashore. But the highlight of the exam was the fellow who was aboard the S. S. White and managed to get a complete dental lab aboard a raft and ashore before the ship went down. No one can say our class is dumb! Second year was not limited to lab work. We indulged in such matters as pathology and bacteriology and also made our first appearance on the clinic floor where the patients displayed a far better knowledge of the workings of the unit than we did. You ' re new to the clinic, aren ' t you, bud? was a common expression among the old hands who had been coming to the school for years. Scrape-odontia was another interesting subject to which we were introduced. Scrape-odontia, or as it is known to the rest of the dental profession, periodontia, also involved working on patients, with the result that at least two in the class fainted from the sight of all the blood. Socially, most of us attended the Student Council dance at the Taft Grill and heard about the growing list of fellows who were approach- ing the state of matrimony. Class parties were absent from the calendar and the class meetings were as noisy as ever, but we did manage to elect Charley Heaphy as president. Junior year found us under the new merger of the medical and dental faculties. By this time we were experienced operators, recasting inlays by the dozens, and rebasing our own cases be- cause Dr. Young found a rock where we thought they fit so well. The seniors were telling us that this was the easy year and that all we had to do was wait ' till we were seniors and had requirements. Maybe we didn ' t have require- ments but we sure had enough weasels in the class to make any outsider think we had. Every night the watchman would drive out the members of the junior class at about seven o ' clock with his automatic, and some members were overheard threatening him with their gold foil pluggers. We were down on the eighth floor now, and Miss Bourque was after us with white glove inspection to make sure those instrument cases were kept clean. What we would all like to know is how she could watch our kits, bandage a cut finger, give out anesthesia trays, revive some patient who had fainted at the sight of a novocain needle, or the student that had just given his first injec- tion, and still be so pleasant and smiling? Will- power is a wonderful thing. Some of the marvels of the year were when we learned that you can cure any mouth disease with an application of estrogen, and our week in surgery. We began our crown and bridge in the clinic and again our dental picture became more sanguinous. It was hard to make a crown fit in the mouth even after that course in the lab. More scrape-odontia and an introduction into the Oral Diagnosis clinic where no punches were pulled in letting us know how much we had to learn. Mister X, that is not a granuloma at the apex of the lower second bicuspid. Did you ever take anatomy and if so, did you ever hear of the mental foramen? Junior year also marked the end of the military careers of all the army and navy train- 28