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

Page 11 text:

. . . has no connection with a hospital or a school, other than belonging to the PTA where his children went to school. Another has stated that In the public ' s eye, (the dentist) doesn ' t provide community leadership, doesn ' t support community activities with either time or money ... So far as the public is concerned, (dentists) all could be members of Anonymous Anonymous. By the time a student starts to prepare for his professional career, his major personality characteristics, sense of values, and behavioral attitudes probably have been determined by his parents, prior schooling, and his peers. The main factor in determining the extent to which the student will acquire the character- istics of social sensitivity is his nature at the time he enters dental school.

Page 10 text:

As dental practitioners many of us will seek to practice in an area that is free from robbery and attacks on our patients and ourselves; as members of the health professions we must nevertheless fulfill our obligations toward the amelioration of physical and oral problems of the ghetto residents; as individual citizens we will desire to live safely in a community, without fear of violence to our wives, selves, or children; and as human beings we must care enough for all people in society to strive towards alleviating the existing misery and suffering. We have a responsibility to ourselves, our families, and society to actively participate in delivering that which we have been trained for, dental health care, to the ghetto community and other poor as well as those more economically favored. The dentist must become a socially sensitive individual. This is a sharp change from the role previously played by and expected of dental practitioners. Heretofore, dentists catered almost exclusively to a white, upper middle class clientele; we now have the responsibility of providing services to the non-white, lower class individuals as well. This duty has not been performed to any great extent by dentists in the past. One writer has character- ized the dentist as the only health professional who encases himself in a five-by-eight room, works from nine till five, four days a week, and never works nights; has no relation to the community around him,

Page 12 text:

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