Temple University School of Dentistry - Odontolog Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

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P re s i d e n t’s Message ROBERT LIVINGSTON JOHNSON A.B., L.L.D. President of Temple University Greetings to the Dental School, Class of 1955: We hear it said no man is indispensable. In a sense, that is true. At the same time, every person, for his own well being, should feel he is indispensable and should live as though he were. Practitioners in the profession you are entering should not find that hard to do. The reason lies in some facts I came on not long ago. They were from the most recent proceedings of the American Dental Association. They showed that fewer than one-third of the American people are receiving adequate dental services. The average adult has lost half of his teeth at the age of forty by reason of accumulated dental neglect. Active dentists in civilian life are increasing in number but not fast enough to equal the gains in general population. To my mind, that makes dentists, as a professional group, as indispensable as any I know. Psychiatrists say no emotional hunger is more fundamental than the need to feel needed. Their files are full of case histories of persons, often successful by every material measure, whose lives become unhappy because they reached the stage where they began to doubt the need and importance of the things to which they had given themselves. For you, that should never be true. Evidence of the need for you is too great, and it will confront you in increasing amounts every day of your life. I am happy for you and for the state and nation that you are ready now to meet with competence and skill this backlog of need. I am proud that the means for making you ready was the Temple University Dental School. 12 Robert L. Johnson, President