Sinking My Teeth In to An Internship at the National Museum of Dentistry

Close up of a map of Baltimore from 1822. 44 is the Baltimore College, which existed from 1803-1830, on Mulberry St and Cathedral St.

 I am working as a curatorial research intern this spring at the Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry! My internship started at the end of January, where I met with my internship supervisor to talk about what the exhibition I would be working on was. This summer, the museum plans to open an exhibition, though I believe it’ll mainly be online, regarding the various dental schools and
universities in Baltimore and Maryland which all eventually became absorbed into the
University of Maryland system. The very first dental school in the entire world was
opened in Baltimore, and so I’m helping on researching each of these historical colleges
and writing profiles on how and when they were founded and by who, where the school
buildings were, basic information about graduates and matriculates, and how they
eventually became a part of the UMD!
I have nine different schools, universities, and private educators that I am
researching, that were established or working from the late eighteenth century up until
the end of the 1800s! This internship is researched focused, so I spend most of my time
working and digging around in digital archives and collections, and reading through
digitized books, journals, publications, letters, and newspapers from one hundred years
ago trying to find information which is relevant to the respective schools.
So far, some of the most interesting things I’ve come across in my research has
been reading through old publications of the American Journal of Dental Science, which
published monthly and covered basically any and all news in the world of professional
dentistry, and old maps of Baltimore from throughout the 1800s to try and hunt down
very specific (usually unlabeled) buildings that once housed dental schools. I’ve lived in
the Baltimore area my whole life, so it has actually been kind of fun to compare maps
from 1820 and 1850 to the modern city, and see how it’s grown and changed. It’s a bit
like being Nancy Drew but for dental colleges!