Doc Holliday, DDS – His Life and Legend
Speaker
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Dr. Frank Heynick studied History at Hunter College (New York) and the University of Reims (France). He received an MA in Applied Linguistics from Columbia University and specialized in Psycholinguistics at the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). In 1983 he received his Doctorate (PhD) in Medicine from the University of Groningen (Netherlands) with the dissertation “Theoretical and Empirical Investigation into Verbal Aspects of the Freudian Model of Dream Generation.”
Since the mid-1990s, Dr. Heynick has authored more than 300 articles (predominantly in the Netherlands dental journal TandartsPraktijk) on a wide variety of intriguing aspects of teeth, mouths, dentists, and dentistry through the centuries.
Dr. Heynick has published several articles on the life and legend of Doc Holliday, most notably in 2001 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Doc’s birth, for which he also made a reconstruction of Doc’s 1872 DDS diploma, using Penn archives.
Dr. Heynick has taught at several universities in New York and the Netherlands.
The curious phenomenon of morphologically “Chinese” incisors (sinodonty) in Native Americans comes up in Dr. Heynick’s just-published novel, “Ursula Dreaming: A Young Apache Woman in Manhattan.” More about it can be found on the (German) Neobooks website:
Disclosure: Dr. Heynick has no relevant financial relationships to disclose.
Course Description
This lecture traces the career of John Henry Holliday from his youth in Georgia before and during the Civil War, through his education at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, to his travels along the Western frontier after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. We conclude by considering Doc’s story as presented in seven Hollywood films and assessing their accuracy.
Educational Objectives
- Learn about the state of dentistry and dental education in the US in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly on the frontier.
- Learn about the distinction between fact and fiction in the life of John Henry “Doc” Holliday (the most famous dentist of all time, albeit for reasons unrelated to his formal profession). Particularly, his: o intermittent practice of dentistry in the “Wild West” o dubious reputation as deadly gunfighter in gambling halls o role at the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881
- Doc’s legend in Hollywood movies
- The shovel-shaped incisors of Native Americans, including the Apache of Arizona, and their (very) distant cousins in East Asia (sinodonty).
Contact
PDMContinuingEd@dental.upenn.edu