A Newly Formed Organization in Dentistry Makes Its Lasting Mark in the Early 1940s

The Philadelphia Root Canal Study Club was formed in 1939¹ in an era that was seeing the wholesale extraction of teeth, based on the theory of focal infection.² This one timely and fortuitous occurrence was the genesis for a national association of dentists interested in root canal therapy. With several other influential dentists in 1943, Dr. Louis I. Grossman, from Philadelphia, began organizing the American Root Therapy Association. At the Chicago Dental Society meeting in February of that year, nineteen dentists from across the country met and the American Society of Endodontists (ASE) was officially formed for the study of root canal therapy (Fig. 1).