Sindecuse Museum of Dentistry

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The Sindecuse Museum of Dentistry is a museum of the history of dentistry, operated by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Located on the university's Central Campus, the museum is one of only a handful of dentistry museums in the world.HistoryThe Sindecuse Museum was established in 1991 with a grant from Dr. Gordon H. Sindecuse, a 1921 graduate of the U-M School of Dentistry. Its first professional part-time curator was hired that year. However, the museum's collections had been forming for several decades before the museum was established, as members of the School of Dentistry faculty, including Dr. Charles Kelsey, Professor Al Richards, and dental librarian Sue Segar, preserved and stored equipment, photos, and documents relating to the history of dentistry and the history of the dental school.The museum was originally housed on the first- and ground-floor lobby of the Kellogg Institute Building. Plans for expansion of the museum as part of a larger renovation of the Kellogg Building began in 1995. Following two years of construction, the Sindecuse Museum reopened on September 8, 2000, with a new atrium taking the place of what was formerly a courtyard that connected the Kellogg and Dental Buildings. The expansion also saw the addition of five new exhibit cases in an adjacent hallway; a climate-controlled collection storage room; and modern storage cabinets and mobile storage racks.