Percy R. Howe

1864–1950

The pioneering first chief of research at the Forsyth Institute, he earned international recognition and set a course for the institute’s future direction.

THE JOB OF Dr. Percy R. Howe’s dreams paid $50 a month. That wasn’t much even back in 1915—only about $1,500 in today’s dollars. By that time, the esteemed dentist was over 50 years old with a “heavy and lucrative” practice in Boston, according to a 1952 book, Dr. Howe and the Forsyth Infirmary, by Rollo Walter Brown. With average male life expectancy in the U.S. around 52 years at the time, it’s no wonder he jumped at the chance to become chief of research at what was then (right and inset) the Forsyth Dental Infirmary for Children. After all, Dr. Howe had long indulged his passion for discovery by self-funding his own research laboratories, studying biology and chemistry using profits from his practice. It was said by those who knew the driven doctor that the pressure of time weighed heavily throughout his life.

Understandably, he didn’t give up his practice immediately, hiring three or four younger dentists to fill in, though he eventually stopped practicing entirely as he became more absorbed at the institute. His professional stature and legendary work ethic helped secure funds to expand the institute’s scope of research, which he leveraged to improve the “incomplete” and “ineffective” theories of dental caries, according to his own notes.

He hired a research team and explored new frontiers in dentistry, from the relationships between food, vitamins and oral health to saliva analysis as an indicator of systemic health. In 1928, Dr. Howe became the institute’s acting director, then its director, sacrificing some beloved research time but significantly contributing to the institute’s overall evolution in part through his personable, egalitarian attitude. “The staff felt how impossible it was for him to be unnecessarily formal about anything,” Brown wrote. “He chatted in the hallways—a brusquely pleasant man who was glad to know that everybody had in mind something interesting and perhaps important.”

In addition to his work at Forsyth between 1915 and 1950, he was the sixty-sixth president of the American Dental Association from 1928 to 1929 and served as a professor at Harvard Dental School from 1925 until 1950. Dr. Howe died on February 28, 1950, vastly outliving many others of his generation.

According to his biographer, “he made scientific excursions into unknown fields-or into disputed ground-in ingenious ways that he himself devised.” a If that sounds eerily like the work of today’s ADA Forsyth Institute, you can grasp the magnitude of Dr. Howe’s influence as a research-er, dentist and even fundraiser. At a time when basic dental research is an underfunded and perhaps even endangered endeavor, Dr. Howe’s work and legacy are more important-and deserving of renewed recognition-than ever.

Previous Inductees

  • 2024: Dr. Dan Fischer, Dr. Dominick DePaola
  • 2023: Dr. Stanley F. Melamed, Otto E. Lienhard
  • 2022: Dr. Edward F. Rossomando, Dr. John A. Molinari
  • 2021: Richard Saslow, Anne Eiting Klamar
  • 2019: Esther Wilkins
  • 2018: Dr. Francis Mouyen
  • 2017: Dr. Rafael Bowen, David Schick
  • 2016: Dr. Richard Pelton, Ernest Crane, Dr. Gordon J. Christensen
  • 2015: Dr. Robert Meyer, Lucy Hobbs
  • 2014: Dr. Jack Dillenberg, Dr. Howard Farran
  • 2013: Dr. William B. Dragan, Dr. John V. Borden
  • 2012: Dr. Joshua Friedman, Jim Glidewell