Dr. Jay Eshleman, past ADA leader, dies at 97
Dr. Jay H. Eshleman, a past ADA trustee and vice president, died March 10. He was 97 years old.
Dr. Eshleman served as ADA vice president in 1961-62 and represented the Association’s Third Trustee District (Pennsylvania) from 1965-71. He was also a past president of the Pennsylvania Dental Association and served as general chair of the ADA Annual Session when it was held in Philadelphia in 1960.
“He loved dentistry, loved his profession, loved organized dentistry,” Dr. Eshleman’s widow, Martha, said of her husband. “He was a tireless worker at the local, state and national levels of the profession.”
Born in 1910 on a farm in rural Lancaster County, Pa., Dr. Eshleman was the eldest of eight children. He received his elementary education in a one-room schoolhouse and walked five miles a day, round trip, to high school.
He attended Elizabethtown College and received his dental degree from what is now the Kornberg School of Dentistry at Philadelphia’s Temple University.
“I opened a practice, but no one came,” he recalled in a 1998 interview. “I was living on one meal a day and passed out cards to local businesses.”
Then one snowy night, Dr. Eshleman encountered a man who was suffering from toothache. The young dentist took that man back to his dental office where he treated the tooth and relieved the man’s pain. Word of this encounter got around the neighborhood, and Dr. Eshleman’s practice took off.
Dr. Thomas W. Gamba, president-elect of the Pennsylvania Dental Association and a lifelong friend of Dr. Eshleman’s, was the major source of information for this report.
“Dr. Eshleman was passionate about organized dentistry,” Dr. Gamba wrote in an obituary sent to the ADA. “He was a man of devout faith and unwavering ethics who prayed on his knees every day and was an active member of his church.”
Dr. Eshleman joined the Navy in 1944 and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. He began teaching practice administration and ethics at Temple in 1949.
“He spoke frequently across the country and in Canada on public health, ethics, community dentistry and dental insurance,” recalled Dr. Gamba. “He participated in White House conferences on health and aging in the 1980s. He was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health.”
In addition to his wife Martha, Dr. Eshleman is survived by three daughters, three grandchildren, three brothers and a sister. Memorial contributions can be sent to the Jay H. Eshleman Endowment Scholarship Fund at the Temple University Kornberg School of Dentistry, office of the dean, 3223 No. Broad St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19140.