[Copenhagen Dental School Department of Forensic Dentistry--25 years of activity].

The Dept. of Forensic Odontology at the Royal Dental College of Copenhagen opened on 1 January 1964. The present article is a short survey of the case load handled over the following 25 years. Table 1 shows the distribution of single cases: the first two columns (U-D = unknown dead persons) in that a total of 444 postmortem dental descriptions were made (by oral autopsy) and that 255 of them led to dental identification; the next two columns (K-S = known missing persons) indicate that a total of 538 antemortem dental descriptions were established (mostly by extraction from private practitioners' records and radiographs), 255 of them being those that led to the already mentioned identifications. The column marked "B-M" shows the number of bite mark cases handled, while the column marked "A-E" concerns dental age evaluation of children adopted from or immigrated from areas with questionnable (if not totally missing) birth registration. The column marked "Var" lists a number of cases that did not fit into the other categories. Table 2 is a survey of the six airplane crashes and three hotel fires that occurred during the same 25 years: the first column shows the total number of victims, the second column the number of victims we were allowed to examine, and the third column the resulting number of dental identifications.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)