Backwards Glance I
n 1865, 150 years ago, the Missouri Dental Association was formed. To be exact, our official anniversary will be October 31, but we’ll be celebrating all year long with special proclamations, events, celebrations, and eventually, a commemorative anniversary book set to publish later this year.
Each issue of the Focus will feature a Backwards Glance of our Association history. It may be an excerpt from a magazine issue or a significant photo or a milestone event remembered. History is a force that shapes our present environment, and our present actions will be the history that shapes the future. Each Backward Glance will celebrate, in a small way, our unique history as the MDA.
In this issue, we focus on our birth with an excerpt from the book Missouri Dentistry: The Biography of a Profession (published in 1965 at the Association’s Centennial Celebration), from the section “Formation of the Missouri State Dental Association,” as well as an image of the first association president, Dr. HJB McKellops.
Pictured is a young and older Dr. Henry James Byron McKellops, the first president of the Missouri State Dental Association. He was born August 31, 1825 near Syracuse, New York and later relocated to St. Louis. Aside from first president of the MDA, he was one of the organizers of the St. Louis Dental Society, founded December 9, 1856, and in 1879 he served as its President. He also was President of the American Dental Association in 1878, one of only seven MDA members to hold the position.
Under the conditions of postwar disharmony, leaders of the profession renewed their efforts to form a statewide organization of dentists. The time was ripe if for no other reason than it had to be done if Missouri was to be represented in the newly organized American Dental Association. Membership was only open to delegated representatives from organized dental groups.
The time was ripe, but personal antagonisms that had existed before the (Civil) war had not been relieved by it. The matter of personality problems had to be overcome, and there was considerable doubt that an association could be formed because of them.
Additionally, Missouri citizens were divided into two angry political camps
that crossed party lines. The state and local governments were controlled by the pro-Northern “Radicals” whose “test-oath” barred many southern sympathizers from full citizenship. Against such repressive control, the liberal Republicans joined Missouri’s Democrats in attempts to restore freedom in the state. This group issued a call for a mass meeting of all citizens desirous of doing something and St. Louis was the designated place of meeting on October 26, 1865.
When postwar political agitation was at its highest, and amidst rifts in the profession, the Missouri State Dental Association had its origin. Although the opposition press spoke scornfully of this gathering, the response was widespread and over a thousand delegates from all parts of the state
converged upon the city (St. Louis). Doctor (HJB) McKellops, re-established in St. Louis practice following his stay in Paris, had figured prominently in the call for the political convention. Among those present were a number of older, established dentists of Missouri, and some of these were to reassemble a few days later to form a state dental association.
Those dentists who had come to the political convention were free to remain in the city and join other dentists at the meeting called by the St. Louis Dental Society to form a state dental association. Accordingly, on the morning of Tuesday, October 31, 1865 in St. Louis, a number of the profession from Missouri and other places met for the purpose of organizing the Missouri State Dental Association.
10 focus | JAN/FEB 2015 | ISSUE 1
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