Abstract
IADR President Abiko, AADR President DeRouen, CADR President Glogauer, honored guests, colleagues, and friends.
I want to thank you for electing me as your vice president several years ago—and honoring me today to serve as president of the IADR at the conclusion of this meeting.
I am pleased that the 93rd IADR General Session is meeting here in Boston, a city that has played a central role in US history dating back to the Puritan settlement in 1630. I hope you will have a chance to explore the city’s historical sites during your time here. The Boston “Brahmins”—families that date back to the 17th- and 18th-century ruling class in Massachusetts—were the standard bearers for Boston-led culture and philanthropy. Their surnames are reflected in the names of communities surrounding Boston (Dudley, Lawrence, Lowell, Peabody, and Quincy). They were instrumental in establishing many of the more than 60 colleges and universities here—including the homes of 3 dental schools—at Boston University, Harvard, and Tufts—and the Forsyth Institute, the leading independent dental research institution.
When I asked 2 IADR members with strong Boston roots, Bruce Donoff, dean, Harvard SDM, and our executive director, Chris Fox, to identify the most significant oral, dental, and craniofacial research contribution that happened in Boston and had had the greatest health impact, their immediate response was that it came from the dentist William T.G. Morton. It was he who performed a painless tooth extraction under ether anesthesia in September 1846 (in a pilot study, if you will). One month later on October 16, 1846, he presided over the first public demonstration of clinical anesthesia, enabling Dr. John Collins Warren to painlessly remove a neck tumor, at what is now the Ether Dome of Massachusetts General Hospital (Beecher and Altschule 1977). The inscription on the wall of the Ether Dome reads that with the introduction of anesthesia, “a new era for surgery began.”
While our mission is “to advance research and increase knowledge for the improvement of oral health worldwide,” our science is not bounded by the mouth, head, and neck. Advances in dental and craniofacial research reflect fundamental and applied research across the full biomedical spectrum. As former US Surgeon General Everett Koop affirmed, it was his “life-long professional belief that the mouth was part of the body and that dentists belong in the mainstream of caregivers” (Surgeon General’s Workshop 1988).
These connections are particularly relevant in my own field of pain research. And again I am reminded of a Boston-based clinician-scientist whose scholarship influenced our thinking about clinical pain. This was the Harvard anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher. While serving in the army during World War II in Italy, he noted that wounded soldiers oftentimes had severe injuries but reported little pain. He contrasted these patients with individuals with similar injuries in civilian settings who reported greater pain, surmising that the degree of pain felt is largely related to the meaning of the pain to the patient. For the wounded soldier, the injury was an honorable ticket from the potentially lethal battlefield—that is, the patient’s pain report is related to cognitive factors. Much of Beecher’s subsequent work addressed the challenge of measuring subjective experience, understanding placebos and their use as controls when assessing subjective responses, the role of psychological factors in their effect—and individual differences (Beecher 1959)—all very relevant to our understanding of acute and chronic pain wherever in the body pain is felt.
My point is that science, including what each of us considers to be our own interests—in what we think of as dental and craniofacial research—part of the IADR—provides us both the opportunities and the obligation to learn from others, contributing to the search for better understanding of human biology and behavior. I wish you a highly productive and enjoyable meeting!