H. Trendley Dean

H. Trendley Dean

Henry Trendley Dean (born August 25, 1893 in East St. Louis (Winstanley Park), Illinois ; † May 13, 1962 in Evanston , Illinois), called "Tren" by his friends, was an American dentist . He is considered to be the father of drinking water fluoridation for the prophylaxis of dental caries .

life and work

Dean graduated from Saint Louis University in 1916 with a degree in dentistry and first opened a dental practice in Wood River, but then moved to III. Field artillery to do its military service in the First World War. He reopened his practice in 1919 and was elected President of the Alton, Illinois, Dental Society in 1920. In September 1921 he married Ruth Martha McEvoy. In the same year, he joined the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and worked in succession as a dentist in several Marine Corps hospitals . From 1928 onwards, Clinton T. Messner, head of the dentists department at the USPHS, tried to establish a central dental research station within the PHS with the support of the American Dental Association (ADA). This was initially carried out with a Dr. Cornwall occupied, but a year later it had "not seriously taken up" work. When Messner joined the ADA's research advisory board in 1929, Dean gave a lecture at its annual meeting on the course of 50 cases of jaw fractures, his entry into the field of dental statistics. Between June 1929 and March 1930, the PHS analyzed diseases of workers who painted clock hands with luminous radium compounds ("radium dial painters"). Dean accompanied the dentistry-relevant part. After attending the USPHS Officers School, in 1931 he was assigned an official research assignment to the National Institute of Health (NIH, initially just one institute). This institute emerged in 1930 from the hygiene laboratory of the Public Health Service and was understood as a clearing house . The “best scientists in the civil service and a few men from outside” should form a kind of hub for services and information, which could not be countered. With this in mind, Surgeon General Hugh Cumming put together an advisory board in late 1931 to suggest meaningful dental research tasks. Members were Russell W. Bunting , Homer C. Brown , Weston Price , Thomas Hartzell, and Thomas J. Hill . At the first meeting in January 1932, the group recommended that Dean first investigate the spread of "mottled teeth" within the USA, but also inform himself about the caries-relevant research of the committee members until this work was completed, in order to then decide which concrete project of caries research he wants to pursue within the NIH. This should help end the chaos caused by the various theories that members of the dental profession are currently putting forward. According to an interview note from historian Donald R. McNeil, it was Bunting who piqued Dean's interest. Russell Bunting, who studied the role of lactobacilli in the development of tooth decay at the University of Michigan in collaboration with Philip Jay , invited Dean to visit the city of Minonk (Illinois) with him on February 5, 1932, where fluoride was found in the water Dental fluorosis triggers residents, while at the same time the incidence of caries is lower than in a nearby place without fluorosis. A few years before fluoride was known to be the cause of tooth staining, Bunting and co-workers had reported that in Minonk the percentage of children with tooth decay was as high as in any other community that only the extent and activity of tooth decay was slightly lower here was. Apparently excited about Bunting's current view of things, but before he even examined any of the children in Minonk himself, Dean wrote in his February 6, 1932 report that the fluorosis test might be the key to a much more important problem, the Dental caries, could deliver. In 1933, when the American Dental Association, in collaboration with the Public Health Service, started the first national tooth decay study, Dean asked for the regional frequency of stained teeth on the questionnaire in order to find clues for a possible connection. He evaluated the data obtained in this way in his 1938 work on endemic fluorosis and its relationship to dental caries (see below).

As part of this cooperation between ADA and USPHS, Dean was also active in a professional political issue. At the annual ADA meeting in October 1932, the public discussion of the cost of dental treatment (see also William John Gies ) was raised as a particular problem for the dental profession. In order to avoid supposed "undesirable developments" in the future, such as B. the introduction of health insurance combined with a cost dictation ("state and panel dentistry", "socialized dentistry"), to be able to avert in good time and in order to integrate dentistry into the public health system, dentists should become more active in health departments at state and community level. In the cooperation, an overview of the current status should therefore be provided along with the caries status of the schoolchildren. H. Activities and presence of dentists in the state health departments, are created. The first data on this were published in 1936 in Public Health Bulletin No. 227 presented.

After the Second World War (1945/46) Dean investigated the occurrence of gingivitis in US soldiers in Germany (called Trench Mouth or Vincent's Infection ). In 1948 he became the first director of the newly formed National Institute of Dental Research. He retired in 1953, but served on the American Dental Association's research advisory board until 1959 . After many years of asthma problems, he died on May 13, 1962.

Epidemiology of dental fluorosis

In 1931, several groups of scientists working independently of one another recognized the presence of fluoride in local tap water as the cause of strange stained and discolored teeth ( "mottled teeth" ) among the inhabitants of some areas. Dean's task was initially to record the regional spread of this problem within the USA and to develop economically justifiable measures to contain it.

Fluoridation for caries prophylaxis

Some researchers had indicated that dental caries occurs less intensively in such regions and so Dean researched in his further career in collaboration with dentists from the University of Michigan the optimal fluoride content of the drinking water, which would prevent tooth decay. To determine dental health, he used the number of carious (decayed), missing (missing) or filled (filled) teeth ( DMF index ), which he correlated with the fluoride content of drinking water in communities. This resulted in efforts to adjust the drinking water to the "optimal" fluoride content to combat tooth decay. After initially voicing health concerns at a meeting with David B. Ast's fluoridation committee in 1944 , he finally publicly advocated drinking water fluoridation in the early 1950s, which is still controversial today.

Criticisms

In his notes on the interview with Trendley Dean, historian Donald McNeil writes: I think he's telling a nice story, but I also get the impression that he has papers somewhere that he doesn't want to talk about. He also messes up time schedules terribly. However, in McNeil's book The fight for fluoridation nothing of this impression can be perceived.

Positions and offices

• Acting assistant dental surgeon, USPHS, 1921-1922, 1924-1925
• US Veterans Bureau, 1923
• Passed assistant dental surgeon, USPHS, 1925-1930
• Dental Surgeon, 1930-1942
• Senior Dental Surgeon, 1942-1945
• Dental Director, 1945-1953
• President of the American Association of Military Dental Surgeons, 1937
• 21. President of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR), 1944-45
• First Director, National Institute of Dental Research, 1948-53

Honors

Gorgas Medal, introduced by Wyeth Laboratories of Philadelphia, in honor of Major General William Crawford Gorgas

• 1949 Gorgas Medal and Award from the Association of Military Surgeons for outstanding preventive medical performance
• 1950 American Water Works Association John M. Goodell Prize
• 1951 Jarvie Fellowship Medal from the New York State Dental Society
• In 1952 he and Frederick Sumner McKay received the Lasker ~ DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award , the highest medical and scientific award in the United States.
• The International Association for Dental Research has presented the H. Trendley Dean Memorial Award annually since 1964

Web links

• H. Trendley Dean Papers, US National Library of Medicine

Individual evidence

1. ^ American Dental Association: Scientific Foundation and Research Commission, Hotel Mayflower, Washington, DC, Oct. 4-10, 1929.
2. ↑ HT Dean: Fractures of the mandible: an analysis of fifty cases. In: J at Dent Assoc. 17 (1930), p. 1074.
3. ^ L. Schwartz, FC Makepeace, HT Dean: Health aspects of radium dial painting. IV. Medical and dental phases. In: J Ind Hyg. 15 (Nov. 1933), p. 447.
4. ↑ Ronald Hamowy: Government and Public Health in America , Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, Cheltenham, UK, 2007, p 341
5. ^ DR McNeil: Reminiscence of Don McNeil with H. Trendley Dean and J. Roy Doty, May 3, 1955 , DR McNeil papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI; McNeil is the author of The fight for fluoridation , Oxford University Press, New York, 1957
6. ↑ HT Dean, Report to Surgeon General Hugh Smyth Cumming, Feb. 6, 1932, in the HT Dean Papers, National Library of Medicine
7. ↑ RW Bunting et al .: Further studies on the relation of Bacillus acidophilus to dental caries. III. , Dental Cosmos 70 (October 1928) p. 1002
8. ↑ Messner CT, Gafafer WM, Cady FC, HT Dean: Dental Survey of School Children, Ages 6-14 Years, Made in 1933-34 in 26 States , Public Health Bulletin No. 226 (May 1936)
9. ↑ HT Dean: Endemic fluorosis and its relation to dental caries , Public Health Reports 53 (August 19, 1938) p. 1443
10. ^ A fact finding committee of the American Dental Association and the US Public Health Service , J Am Dent Assoc 20 (1933) p. 716
11. ↑ An important conference , J Am Dent Assoc 20 (1933) p. 1282
12. ↑ Cady FC, HT Dean, CT Messner: A survey of dental activities of state departments and institutions of the United States , Public Health Bulletin No. 227, Government Printing Office, Washington, June 1936
13. ^ Francis A. Arnold: H. Trendley Dean, President of the IADR, 1944-1945. J. dent. Res. 42: 1 (1963) p. 3
14. ^ HT Dean, in Chemicals in Foods and Cosmetics. Hearings before the House Select Committee to investigate the use of chemicals in foods and cosmetics. House of Representatives, 82nd Congress, Part 3, Government Printing Office, Washington 1952, p. 1648
15. ^ DR McNeil: Reminiscence ... , loc. cit.
16. ↑ HT Dean: curriculum vitae, Jan. 1953; HT Dean Papers, Natl. Library of Medicine
17. ↑ The first fifty year history ( memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , International Association for Dental Research. Retrieved July 11, 2016.