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Why Boston University Dental School Carries Henry M. Goldman's Name

The Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine has one of the longest names in American dentistry. Most people who hear it have no idea who Goldman was, or why the school carries his name.

The Man

Henry M. Goldman (1911-1991) was an oral pathologist and periodontist who held an unusual conviction for his era: that dentistry wasn't a trade separate from medicine but a subspecialty of it, governed by the same biological principles that shape the rest of the body. He spent his career working to make that idea real, not as abstract theory but as the foundation for how dentists were trained.

After serving at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology during World War II, Goldman turned his attention to periodontics. Clinical practice surfaced two interlocking problems: patients rarely understood their own oral health, and dentists weren't trained in a way that helped them explain it. He concluded that fixing the second was the only way to fix the first.

Building a School

In 1958, Goldman founded the Division of Stomatology within BU's School of Medicine. At the time, it was the only program in the country devoted entirely to postdoctoral dental specialization. On October 16, 1963, he signed the charter that transformed it into the Boston University School of Graduate Dentistry, and became its first dean.

For more than a decade, he shaped the school's curriculum, recruited its faculty, and instilled the philosophy that still defines it: that good dentistry depends on biology, careful diagnosis, and clinicians who can communicate about both. The predoctoral DMD program followed in 1972, built on the graduate specialty foundation he had already laid.

The Name

The school was officially renamed the Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine in 1996, five years after his death. To me, the renaming reads less as a tribute to a long-tenured dean and more as a quiet acknowledgement: his way of thinking is what the school exists to carry forward.

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