Each year the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine honors its students at the White Coat Ceremony. It is a respected tradition for dental students that signifies the transition from preclinical studies to clinical care. Students earn their white coats at the end of their second year of the Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) program or their first year of the Advanced Standing International Student Program (ISP). The coats are presented by
the Colorado Dental Association, American College of Dentists, International College of Dentists and Pierre Fauchard Academy. The ceremony also comes with reading the dental oath; students pledge themselves “to the service of humanity, my patients, my community, and my profession.”
Below is an excerpt from Dr. Jerry Savory, a longtime CDA and BBCDS member as well as the current section chair of the Colorado/Wyoming American College of Dentists. Dr. Savory delivered these words at this year’s White Coat Ceremony on Sept. 15, 2023.
By Dr. Gerald Savory
From the Autumn 2023 Journal of the Colorado Dental Association
Thank you, Dean Kassebaum, distinguished faculty members and guests, loving parents, spouses and family members, friends, and my young colleagues – “Doctors to Be,” recipients of the white coat. The seal of the American College of Dentists holds special significance. According to the history of Herodotus, (first writer of history as we know it today) among the Egyptians of the Fifth Century, B.C., “some physicians are for the eyes, others for the head, others for the teeth…” This statement indicates that a group of priest and priestess-physicians actually specialized in dental matters. So today is the day you are to be officially robed with one of the most powerful symbols of a priest or priestess – a servant healer. Your new neatly pressed white coat is presented to you with great anticipation and excitement. As you place it about your shoulders, relish the moment as I did 50 years ago. When I received my white coat, I remember an older and wiser friend of mine saying to me, “Savory, if someone invites you into their body to do something irreversible you are walking on mighty sacred ground.” And then he emphatically declared, “DON’T SCREW IT UP!” I brought my own raggedy old white coat today to share some of the memories, privileges I have experienced as a practicing dentist, as well as the burdens I had to shoulder. Oh yes there are the not so faint stains from rubber base impression material, hundreds of pounds of tooth dust, splashes of exudate from infected pulps and blood stains from cranky difficult molar extractions. The coat also bears the tatters, experiences, and hard work of learning to be a trusted confidant for my patients, sharing our mutual fears and anxieties as I worked for them and their families for so many years. There are droplets of the remarkable gift of being able to immediately and totally remove intractable pain with a simple injection of five cc’s of lidocaine. There are perspiration stains as I worked for 47 years as a dental surgeon in a space no wider than my three fingers, all the while battling an untamed glossus in a pond of saliva.
Additionally, I have been asked to be a psychologist, anesthesiologist, physical therapist, pharmacist, laboratory technician, leader, and manager of my patients, our team members and myself – a business owner, financier, continual student, consoler of people who have lost a measure of health, teacher, and philosopher. All this while being a supportive spouse, receiving the gifts and responsibilities of being a father to our three children, struggling to live a robust life outside dentistry, and preparing myself and my wife for a secure future that when the time comes, we can retire with a measure of dignity and gratitude for what dentistry has provided us. There are a lot of easier ways to make a living but everyday I am filled with gratitude for being a dentist. If you look close enough at my coat you can also see the tear stains of my patients and myself when, together, we encountered challenges that I simply did not know how to help them. It was at these times that I encountered the gift of my own vulnerability. Try to make peace with your vulnerabilities. One of the most crucial benefits of vulnerability is that it builds trust and intimacy in relationships. For me it was an opportunity to open up and relinquish my fears of rejection, which helped my patients and I to build trust and honesty, fostering mutual empathy and thus stronger bonds. You simply cannot do the best you know how to do every time you sit down to do it.
Congratulations as you continue the journey into the life of a servant healer. Most importantly, learn to be yourself as everyone else is taken.