WINTER 2016
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NUMBER 61
cemetery’s front desk, who had not previously heard of the dentist. “I took some pictures of three apex locators—one quite old, one that I currently use, and one that is of recent origin— that I deployed across Custer’s headstone,” Dr. Weeks said.
Dr. Weeks Relates
Dr. Weeks honored Dr. Custer by placing apex locators from different eras on Dr. Custer’s headstone.
Dr. Weeks was more interested in Dr. Custer’s dental achievements. “In 1901, he published a book entitled Dental Electricity which described various uses for electricity in the dental office and included a chapter on how a dentist could generate the electricity himself,” Dr. Weeks explained. Dr. Weeks began to include information about Dr. Custer in his lectures at the College and at dental meetings. He also told his wife, Mary, that if they ever came near Dayton, OH, he would like to visit the cemetery where Dr. Custer is buried and locate his grave. “In the summer of 2013, we learned that our daughter, who was in Boston studying for a PhD in in molecular microbiology at Tufts University, would be visiting her boyfriend in Columbus, OH, where he was studying quantitative psychology,” Dr. Weeks explained. “My wife suggested we drive down and visit them, since we hadn’t seen our daughter for a while.” He liked the idea, and reminded her that they would be passing Dayton. His wife knew what he meant by that and rolled her eyes. “It was an opportunity not to be missed,” Dr. Weeks proclaimed. “I knew Custer was buried in Woodland Cemetery,” Dr. Weeks said. “It has its own website and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Woodland is often visited by historians and the curious, as it features the gravesites of aeronautics pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, writer Erma Bombeck, and George P. Huffman, whose Huffman Manufacturing Co. produced Huffy bicycles. Dr. Weeks’ inquiry about Dr. Custer surprised the man working at the
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Much like Dr. Custer, Dr. Weeks has an interesting background that includes an indirect route to dentistry. After graduating from Rockford College with a BA in Chemistry, he moved back home to Evanston, IL, first working installing car radios and then obtaining a security guard post at Evanston Hospital—“my first experience in healthcare,” Dr. Weeks said. After about a year, he applied for a job in the hospital’s clinical biochemistry laboratories. Initially rejected for the post because he did not have a background in medical technology, he later was offered the position. Subsequently, the Program Director of the Evanston Hospital School of Medical Technology suggested that he take a one-year course of study leading to a certificate in that discipline. Dr. Weeks did so, and he “remained in the clinical biochemistry lab for almost nine more years,” he recalled. “For the last two years, I was the Education Coordinator for the lab; I had the task of orienting med tech students to the lab, and facilitating their training during their rotations there.” For a while it was part of his job to draw blood samples from patients, but the hospital eventually made the decision “that the techs’ time was better utilized in the lab and the phlebotomy duties were transferred to others,” Dr. Weeks said. He noted that he “missed the patient contact, and this probably planted the seed of looking around for some other healthcare related work,” Dr. Weeks said. Deciding on dentistry partly because his grandfather had been a dentist, he was accepted to the UIC College of Dentistry, and earned his DDS in 1989 at age 38.
Electronic Root Canal Measurement Dr. Weeks returned to Evanston Hospital as a resident in a Hospital Dentistry General Practice Residency Program, and then was in practice for two years as a general dentist before coming back to the College and entering its postgraduate endodontics program. It was there that he was “introduced to the use of electronic devices for measuring root canal length,” he recalled. The literature included a study by Dr. Imao Sunada of Tokyo Medical and Dental University, who found that electrical resistance measurements could locate the end of root canals in dogs. Dr. Sunada’s study had been published in 1962, and was based in part on earlier work by another investigator, Dr. K. Suzuki, which was done in 1942. Dr. Weeks noted that he and the other residents