Orthodontic profiles: John Valentine Mershon

Abstract

John Valentine Mershon Junpretentious man who was endowed with qualities of mind and heart that marked him as a great personality. As long as there is a specialty of orthodontics, he will be known for his quiet, genial, and generous efforts to help others. His gentle nature won him many friends, from little children to case-hardened colleagues who may not have seen eye to eye with him. He was born at Penn's Manor, Pennsylvania, on July 7, 1867, the youngest of the nine children of Onias C. and Amanda Valentine Mershon. He attended the local elementary school and the Model School at Trenton, New Jersey. Having decided to become a dentist, he entered the Pennsylvania Dental College (later merged with the University of Pennsylvania), from which he was graduated in 1889 with the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery. He served his alma mater as Instructor in Dentistry for some years and engaged in the general practice of dentistry in Philadelphia for nineteen years. In 1896 Miss Harriet Lane Worrall, member of an old colonial family of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Mershon were married. When orthodontics became his absorbing interest, Dr. Mershon sought training at the Angle School of Orthodontia. Upon completion of the course of instruction in 1908, he returned to Philadelphia and limited his practice to orthodontics, being one of the first in eastern Pennsylvania to do so. His inquiring, analytic mind and his dedicated desire to best serve his patients soon brought him an orthodontic practice as large and select as had been his in general dentistry. During most of his years in practice he had some association with teaching. From 1916 to 1925, he served as Head of Orthodontics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he tried to show the undergraduates the need and possibilities of orthodontic treatment. He and his assistant instructors conducted a demonstration clinic; time did not permit teaching the undergraduates how to do the work. It was his aim to present orthodontics from the biologic rather than the mechanistic viewpoint.