Thursday Open Line


Harvard University, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1636, is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Thus, it was already a bit long in the tooth when on this date in 1867 when it opened the first dental school associated with a medical school. It was also the first to be permanently established by a university, making the full scholarly and scientific resources of a university available to dental education. The first class commenced on November 4 the following year with an enrollment of just 16 students. Today, there are some 147,000 dentists practicing in more than 131,000 offices across the country, employing over 850,000 people. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at <www.census.gov>.