Medicine: Cruncher & Coattails

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The death mask of John Dillinger provided the liveliest attraction for the convention of the American Dental Association in St. Paul last week. The mask was made at the Dillinger postmortem, two hours after his killing. Chicago's enterprising Reliance Dental Manufacturing Co. got possession of the mask, had its white plaster surface painted with a verisimilitude which fascinated law-abiding dentists.

Another fascinating attraction for the dentists was their perennial standby, the machine which shows how much pressure is necessary to chew various foods. According to that cruncher, to chew bread crusts requires up to 350 lb. pressure; to chew gum drops up to 250 lb.; tough meat up to 90 lb.; well-done beefsteak, 60 lb.; tender, boiled corned beef, 35 lb.; boiled ham, 60 lb.; mutton chops, 40 lb.; tender roast veal, 40 lb.; roast beef, 60 lb.; roast pork, 35 lb.; hard candy, 120 lb.

Professionally the dentists were worried about making a living. They considered organizing under an NRA code. But they decided against that when they realized that as members of a code they would cease to be professional men. Federal Emergency Relief Administration is giving dentists much welcome work for which they considered setting nationwide fees. But they decided against that, too, on the theory that they would make more money by letting local dental societies set fee schedules. Any dentist or dental society that gets out of line will, as Dentists' President Arthur Cornelius Wherry puts it, be ''chastised."

President Wherry, a big prosperous dental surgeon from Salt Lake City, but no Mormon, had Dr. Frederick Cook Warnshuis of the American Medical Association tell the dentists what the doctors are doing about "socialized medicine." Dr. Warnshuis, who is speaker of the A. M. A. House of Delegates, was obliged to tell the dentists that the doctors are fighting socialization of medicine with masterly sound, fury and inaction. The dentists decided that the safest thing for them to do during that fight was to hang on the doctors' coattails.

Dr. Frank Monroe Casto, a jolly, curly-headed golfing orthodontist from Cleveland, succeeded Dr. Wherry as A. D. A. president. His successor next year will be Dr. George Ben Wade Winter, nervous St. Louis exodontist, famed among his co-workers for his clever methods of pulling out impacted wisdom teeth.