Kentucky Dental Association

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About KDA The mission of Kentucky Dental Association is to serve, enhance, and represent all aspects of the dental profession in Kentucky and to promote the oral health of the public we serve by: Being the advocate for the dental profession and oral health in public and governmental arenas. KDA History KDA TODAY January/February 2000 A Potpourri of Kentucky History By Dr. Joe W. Jones, Jr. This effort at some KDA history is real potpourri and comes from our far-western component, Purchase. Dr. Woodfin Hutson, a KDA past president who practiced in Murray for many years, is our source. Retired and living in Arizona, Hut remains a very interested member of the KDA. He was an excellent dentist with a deep love of our profession and keeps up with KDA matters by religiously reading our publications and communications. There is surely somewhat of an historian, such as Dr. Hutson, in each of our KDA components and there certainly is the history. This history will eventually fade and die unless someone volunteers to record it. I would like to hear from any of our members and print your interesting stories. The Works Progress Administration ( WPA ) was a part of President Franklin Roosevelt's recovery program for the Great Depression of the 1930s. Those of us who remember it usually think of the thousands of structures that were constructed, but there were many lesser projects that really had no good reason for being, other than to put people to work. One such project was the printing, in 1940, of a booklet, "Medicine and Its Development in Kentucky". This was sponsored by Kentucky Department of Health Dentistry is proud of its ancestry. Mummies have been found with gold fillings, and the Greek laws of the Twelve Tables permitted the interment of the dead without recovery of the gold that might be buried with them. Such honorable antiquity in no way barred the use of advertising, as modern as it might be, parading by permission, the use of names of prominent men in politics, the church, the law, but rarely, and as today it would, the stage. Dr. Smithers, "late of Washington, D. C., " determined to become a citizen, notifies the good people of Frankfort, Lexington, Versailles, Georgetown, and Louisville that his services are to be at their disposal at a price and refers them, among others, to Henry Clay, Professor Chambers, the Rev. Silas Noel, "and the greater part of the delegation to Congress for the last twenty years." That was in 1830. About the same time, James Challenu, second house from the corner of Main and Spring streets, nearly opposite Masonic Hall, "offers to attend ladies at their residences and to perform all operations in dentistry agreeably, with approved scientific methods." The advertisements were elaborately detailed. Prices were "within the reach of all." The rise in dignity, since these days of "ballyhoo" has been noteworthy ; the dentist had been a figure at county fairs he is today a specialist held in high respect. It is the opinion of Shryock that dentistry had suffered for a long time under "the age-old prejudice attached to actual work with the hand, " a position he seems to hold alone. Isn't it more probable that it suffered from the ill-repute into which it had fallen from, the practices of charlatans who exploited the gullibility of the "yokel" and pulled teeth as an exhibitionary stunt? The first dental society was organized in Louisville in March 1891 as the "Reciprocity Club or Dental Protective Association" ; by May 1896 it had expanded into the "Falls Cities Dental Society" and in 1900 new life and a new name came with the "Jefferson County Dental Society." There are dental societies in a number of counties and groups of counties, such as the Bluegrass and the Green River.