IN HOWLING school lad and burly truck drives alike there exists a common fear, that of the dentist drill rasping through dentine in seeming horrible search for the nerve. No lean scholar is Dr. LeRoy L. Hartman of Columbia's dental school, yet from his laboratory he has come forth with a discovery that entailed twenty years of research. As a consequence, the dental bogey man, pain, is now gone, and dentists everywhere are polishing tools for emergence out of the depression. Dr. Hartman has developed a chemical which, applied to the tooth, almost instantly kills its entire capacity for feeling. It leaves no after-effects.

Graduate of Northwestern University's dental school in 1913, Dr. Hartman interrupted private practice in Seattle to go to war. On his return be assailed dental pain. Now ready for general use, his "desensitizer" will be made available to the unmonied through patent control by Columbia University. In the gallery of benefactors of humankind, Northwestern's and Columbia's Dr. Hartman's portrait will look out with a bluff twinkle that for once does not give the dentist's false assurance.