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

Page 9 text:

The way in which we can make the greatest progress toward reducing violence in America is by taking the actions necessary to improve the social, physical, and psychological condi- tions of family and community life for all who live in our cities, and especially for the poor who are concentrated in the ghetto slums.

Page 8 text:

Underlying most of the events cited above is the increasing amount of violence in our society and our reaction to or attempts to escape from it. Violence has been compared to a fever in the body politic; it is but a symptom of some more basic pathology which must be cured before the fever will disappear. The primary etiologic fac- tors of the disease include haphazard urbanization, racial dis- crimination, disfiguring of the environment, unprecedented interdependence, and the dislocation of human identity and moti- vation created by an affluent society. These basic causes cannot be eliminated entirely.

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,