Anne Dale, Class of 5T8

“I would like to be a thread that runs from James Branston Wilmot to now,” says Anne Dale, referring to the founder of what would become the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Dentistry. “To be there for the students. Give them a little hand. I did a lot of that and it was fun.” Her thread with the university began seventy years ago. She started as a BA student in 1950. Post-degree, forestry wouldn’t let her in — women weren’t admitted — but she tagged along to husband Jack’s 5T8 interview for the DDS program. After Jack, Major Colin Rous, then-secretary of the DDS program, addressed Anne. “Your turn,” he said.

“In five minutes, my life changed,” says Dale, who graduated second in the class, just after her husband. They both took specialty training at Harvard’s Forsythe Institute. Anne focused on bacteriology and oral medicine. Then, with two small children, she started teaching histology and oral anatomy at the Faculty. 

Dentistry is a brotherhood. I am a brother. I was a dentist first. I’m still a dentist first

“Dentistry is a big family,” says Dale. And she has long served as something of a den mother, albeit one with a masterful grip on the program’s toughest science content. Decades of alumni have stories: she tutored George Christodoulou 8T5 after a serious injury. She influenced the women-heavy class of 8T0, plus attended their hockey games. Many consider her a formative role model.

Dale acknowledges that she was “a woman in a man’s environment.” But she was just doing her best. “Dentistry is a brotherhood. I am a brother. I was a dentist first. I’m still a dentist first,” says Dale.

If teaching is Dale’s second calling, museum curation is a close third. Jack began curating the Dentistry museum in 1964 while Anne helped, and eventually took over. Dale retired from teaching in 2002, but still treks to the Faculty to support 145 years of dental history through the museum’s artifacts.

She’s built the largest dental museum collection in Canada, and quite possibly North America, a feat that won Dale the Hayden-Harris Award from the American Academy of the History of Dentistry in 2018. That’s not just a thread between this whip-smart, hardworking and compassionate dentist, teacher and curator, and other seminal dentists in the Faculty’s history. It’s a legacy Dale can call her own.

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Photo: Anne Dale (Jeff Comber)