Dr Julius David Manson

Reluctant dentist who championed periodontistry as key to oral health

OUR FATHER Dr (Julius) David Manson, who has died just before his 95th birthday, was a dentist, teacher, researcher and writer, whose pioneering textbook on the prevention of tooth loss became a key reference for dentists world-wide.

As a newly qualified dentist David was shocked when faced with a request from a father, to take out all his daughter’s teeth. In 1947, on the eve of the NHS, this wedding present was designed to help the happy couple’s future finances, such was the state of dentistry in those times! He refused to do it.

Descended from Lithuanian immigrants, David was born in Dundee to Sidney (the 11th of 13 children) and Fanny, also a child of Lithuanian migrants and the eldest of nine. When he was six, his family moved from Nottingham to Leeds. He won a scholarship to the City of Leeds School in 1936, and subsequently to Leeds University.

His academic success came against the backdrop of family ill health and financial hardship. We know he experienced intense shame asking relatives for food, and hiding from the landlady seeking unpaid rent. But his parents nevertheless insisted he and his siblings stayed in education.

David was a copious reader. At the age of eight, he read that African people cleaned their teeth with twigs. He broke off a privet twig which to brush his teeth. His mouth and face were covered with city soot and he concluded that Africa’s trees were cleaner than the hedges of Chapeltown. It was his first piece of clinical research!

On leaving school he wanted to study chemistry or medicine, but was prevented by quotas on Jews entering particular professions, and his hard-won medical scholarship was torn from him. Instead he heeded family advice and studied dentistry at Leeds University, graduating in 1947.

In 1946 David met our mother Hilda Bloom at a party. Her singing, cooking, wit and driving skills bewitched him; they were married two years later.

Hilda persuaded him to specialise after ten dispiriting years often failing to save people’s teeth. He gained a fellowship in dental surgery, and they took their young family to the USA where David studied the emerging field of periodontics, virtually unknown in the UK.

Returning to Britain in 1960, he took up a post at London’s Royal Dental Hospital, the only periodontology post at that time. He taught and practised there and was made a consultant in 1963. From the early 1970s he worked at the Eastman Dental Hospital and became a leading teacher and practitioner, providing better oral health care for all. He was a kind and wise teacher: he taught in many countries and students internationally enjoyed “The Manson Laugh-ins”. In the UK he was called “Dave mucky gums Manson”.

His book Periodontics for the General Practitioner, published in 1966 put periodontology at the forefront of oral health. He was the first to write about personalised dental care, noting the patient’s lifestyle and general health, rather than just treating the disease. Now, 53 years later and in its 10th edition, this book has been translated into many languages.

David was awarded the first honorary membership of the British Society of Periodontology, the Society’s highest honour. Always a team player, he eventually called on younger colleagues to update his book with contemporary research and practice.

While we became ambassadors for the idea that you lose more teeth through gum disease than tooth decay, to us his four children, he was just our hairy, funny, irascible and sometimes impossible father.

In his retirement in London, he sculpted and wrote biographies but – always a poet -- in his last few days he wrote a Haiku for a health care assistant at the Royal Free hospital: “Pigtails mask a nurse. Tendrils hide a tenderness. Mending is her name.”

Hilda predeceased him in 2015, while his brother Louis, died a few weeks before him. He is survived by his children, Lesley, Claire, Nicky and Andrew, by his five grandchildren, his companion Winnie and his sister Joyce. .

Dr J David Manson: born August 16,1924. Died August 8, 2019