Viewing page 37 of 152

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

April 19, 1930.

Dr. C. C. Messner
U.S. Public Health Service,
Treasury Department,
Washington, D.C.

Dear Doctor Messner:

Your letter of the fifteenth is before me.  Please do not misinterpret my motive in the making of the numerous suggestions.  They were prompted by what I understood was expected of me when detailed to the "Northland".  My duty I felt embraced three things:-

I.  to attend to the dental needs of the officers and crew and keep them dentally fit for service;

II.  to relieve the natives suffering from dental ills and do all that time and facilities would permit to prevent later suffering by means of fillings and education;

III.  to make a careful survey of the dental needs of the natives and to help you, provided I found dentistry necessary for them, to impress upon the Coast Guard the absolute need of the services of a dental officer aboard on each annual cruise.  The fact that I was the first dental officer to be detailed to Arctic Alaska, and that you would not have had any one, had I not volunteered to go, even at my own expense, so deeply impressed me that I seem to have overemphasized in some of my recommendations.

For example, I know perfectly well that you could not promise to send a dentist of at least five years' experience.  I did not mean to suggest any sort of promise from you.  I only wanted to state my convictions as formed by having lived into the problem, so that you could be guided in the selection of the right type of man for the special kind of service to be rendered.  May I congratulate you on your success in having secured additional funds and the prospect of being in position to always send a dental officer with the "Northland"?  For several years at least, the natives will not be able to have dentistry from private practitioners.  Firstly, because only a very few could pay for it and secondly, because the itinerant dentist could not reach