Ending of my Internship: the National Museum of Dentistry

 

The sign marking the location of Edgar Allen Poe’s death. He was found seriously ill in the streets of Baltimore before being taken to the Washington Medical College (later known as the Washington University of Baltimore) Hospital. He died there, but not before mysteriously calling the name “Reynolds!”, who has to this day never been identified.

As the semester draws to a close, so too does my internship at the Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry. This past month I have been working on drafting and editing profiles for the various dental and medical schools that I had been researching over the course of this internship.

                It’s actually been a bit of fun going through and seeing, and then converting to modern currency, the tuition and fees for a lot of these different schools in these profiles. Even back in 1830, you’d pay around 100$-200$ for an entire medical education, with fees included, which is usually around 2,000$-7,000$ for an entire college education at the most in today’s money. A lot of these schools also, just like modern colleges, accepted transfer students, but interestingly enough, accepted a range of different equivalencies. If you had worked as an apprentice for 5 years, that was usually enough to be equivalent to one year of formal medical education!

The profiles are mainly focusing on each school’s life, not necessarily the founders and their backgrounds, or notable students, which is the only area that I find a bit frustrating. A lot of the backgrounds of the men who founded these schools is pretty interesting, such as one man who left his position at UMD to join the Confederate Army, found his job no longer available once he returned, and then opened his own medical college tailored to ex-Confederates specifically! The school’s catalog from 1868 even mentions that all white men should be entitled to their own political views and freedoms, which is sort of beautifully ironic.

Overall, I have enjoyed this internship and the experiences and opportunities it brought me. Doing research through 150 year old books and getting to search through Maryland legislature from the 1790s has been very interesting, and I hope once this exhibition goes up, that you’ll give it a visit, dear reader.