February 25, 1926-January 26, 2017
Dr. Leonard Linkow, who took the dentistry profession by storm after revolutionizing the earliest known forms of dental implants, passed away peacefully last Thursday afternoon. The Brooklyn-born dentist was graduated from NYU Dental School and is responsible for changing the course of dentistry in one lifetime. He is known as the “Father of Dental Implants.” He is the only dentist to ever be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Dr. Linkow was recruited to be on the NY Giants baseball team but decided to enter the U.S. Army from May 15, 1945 to May 16, 1946. He placed his first dental implant in 1952, four months after he was graduated from dental school. He set a path for countless physicians after trailblazing through generations of doubters and non-believers by sharing and proving his results with patients and colleagues alike. It takes a certain bravery to go against the norm in a field like oral surgery. Dr Linkow, having been the first to use titanium blade implants, asserting that there would be enough jawbone resorption throughout the characteristically designed grooves of these resilient implants after surgery, gave thousands of people their confidence back with the final touch of some beautifully filed porcelain and a real reason to smile. Whether it’s subperiosteal over endosteal, or a blade over a screw, his foresights into the direction of how artificial teeth should come to use were nothing short of a miracle. People with periodontal diseases, injuries or other reasons would find refuge under his steady and stealth hands. He was known to perform many operations a day with little to no breaks. In 1992, NYU, his alma mater, created the first and only endowed chair in implantology (which bears his name in perpetuity). Dr. Linkow has published 22 books translated in seven languages, authored more than 100 clinical articles, and has six institutes named after him, some of which include the Linkow International Institute of Oral Implantology in Bari, Italy; the Linkow International Institute of Oral Implantology in St. Petersburg, Russia; and the Linkow Implant Institute-Caribbean in Kingston, Jamaica. He holds 36 U.S. patents in dental implants. He was Knighted in the Saint Thomas Church in NYC and has a street named after him in Koppel-Graffenhausen, Germany. In 50+ years of practice, Dr. Linkow has treated more than 100,000 patients. He was one of the three founding fathers of ...
