PLANS FOR DENTAL SCHOOL TO INCLUDE MEDICAL WORK

Increased medical training for dentists will be the policy adopted by Harvard's new School of Dental Medicine opening next fall, Dean C. Sidney Burwell of the Medical School stated in a report issued today. Both dentistry and medicine have been retarded by being isolated, he maintained.

Dental students will register in both the School of Dental Medicine and in the Medical School for a five-year course, taking three and one-half years of the same medical courses as other students in the Medical School, and in addition one and one-half years of specific dental training.

Graduates will receive both the M.D. and D.M.D. degrees. Admissions to the School of Dental Medicine will be governed by the same standards and the same committee which govern admissions to the Medical School.

The new School has been made possible by gifts from the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation. The School's permanent assets for teaching and research in dentistry will total $2,550,000.

The new course, Dean Burwell pointed out, will combine the basic knowledge and skills of both medicine and dentistry and is designed to train new types of scientific workers for the attack on the great public health problem of general disease.

"Graduates of this combined course," Dean Burwell stated, "will have an admirable basis for the general practice of dentistry. They will also have an admirable basis for developing in teaching, research, special types of practice, and public health in the broad area of dentistry.

Experiment Appropriate Here

"This new School is an educational experiment. It is a type of experiment that can very well be carried out at Harvard, where the traditions of cooperation and progress are so strong. There is no suggestion that the plan as adopted should be made the basis of all education for the practice of dentistry.

"There is, however, a firm belief that there is in dentistry a great opportunity for a group of men who have the type of training which is offered by the opportunities of the new curriculum. It is believed also that this association of men training for medicine and for dentistry in the same course will be beneficial to training of all the students in the Medical School.

"Medicine has no doubt suffered by its relative isolation from dentistry and by the extraordinary lack of material relating to dental and oral disease which is found in the experience offered by the cuurricula of medical schools."