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It was quite a culture shock when I left school to go University.
As I was keen on science and good with my hands, I decided to take up the family profession - Dentistry. Newcastle University( Durham University, as it was then) beckoned as Mum’s family were all there, and it was (and still is) a very good Dental School. Of course, Dentistry has come on in leaps and bounds since my student days. When I think of how primitive procedures were when I was a student and compare how things are now, it is quite staggering the advances that have been made. It won’t be long, I believe, before fillings are a thing of the past. I remember when tooth (fissure) sealing first came out in the late 1970’s; I made sure that both my kids and my nieces had the treatment, some of the sealant is still in place 40 years on.
I can trace Dentists in my family tree as far back as the 1880’s (before that they were called ‘barber surgeons’) including my maternal grandfather (1890’s) and his brother (1880’s), my uncle (1930’s) – who unfortunately didn’t survive Dunkirk -- then me (1960’s) and now my daughter (1990’s). Strange though it may seem to some of you, we Dentists actually enjoyed our work and took great pride in treating our patients well. As my daughter told Bob Holdness, when she was on Blockbusters: ‘Dentists are very nice people'.