Michigan Dental Association

Formerly the Michigan State Dental Association.

The Michigan Dental Association was founded in 1856 through the efforts of two Detroit dentists, Hiram Benedict and Lorrain Christopher Whiting. The Society was conceived as a vehicle through which professional standards could be raised through exchanges of information. During the Civil War, discussion and debate was supplemented by the practice of holding clinics, allowing for demonstrations. Supply houses also began to send representatives to meetings, in order to demonstrate their products.

The Association's efforts to raise professional standards inevitably led it to be interested in dental education. The society was instrumental to the founding of a dental school at the University of Michigan in 1875, and for almost a quarter of a century thereafter maintained a visiting committee which come to Ann Arbor to monitor the school's progress. Efforts to guarantee professionalism in dentistry also led the Association to seek legislation regulating dentists. The Association first achieved this goal in 1883 when the state legislature passed a law establishing a dental licensing board.

Around the turn of the century the once dynamic organization had begun to show signs of stagnation. A determined effort by several members between 1906 and 1908 led to a complete reorganization of the body, as well as to renewed interest and life. In 1920 the Association's membership first passed 1,000. The organization's basic goal continued to be the professionalization and advancement of dentistry through education and regulation.

For a complete history of the organization, the researcher should consult Robert M. Warner, Profile of A Profession: A History of the Michigan State Dental Association (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964).