Lost Museum of Harvard's Dental School

Nearly as old as the Dental School itself, Harvard's Dental Museum was originally intended to display specimens of mechanical dentistry prepared by graduating students. It soon became a repository for specimens of human and comparative odontology, pathology, and anatomy, instruments, models, photographs, and lantern and stereoscopic slides. The Museum also housed some unusual historical items.

The published Announcement of the Dental School for 1937 has a brief but detailed description of the Dental Museum, and information about the collection had been included in the annual catalogs for the past sixty years. In the following year's edition of the Announcement, however, no entry for the Museum is included, and one never appears again. Just what happened to Harvard's Dental Museum, and where are its collections now?