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  Dentist's exams bring peace to troubled familiesBy Neil Osterweil Editor's note: CNN.com has a business partnership with MedPageToday.com, which provides custom health content. A medical profile from MedPage Today appears each Tuesday.  John P. Kenney is one of three civilian dentists, who works with the military to identify POW/MIA remains. HEALTH LIBRARYYOUR E-MAIL ALERTSCHICAGO, Illinois (MedPage Today) -- An airport tarmac isn't the usual route to dental school, but then Dr. John P. Kenney isn't your average tooth jockey. As a forensic dentist, he has identified human remains from eight major catastrophes over a span of 20 years, including plane crashes, train accidents and the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center terrorist attack. In his former role as chief forensic odontologist for the Cook County Medical Examiner's office, as little as a single tooth was sometimes all he needed to identify the victims of homicides, fires and car crashes. As one of only three civilian dentists working with the U.S. military's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, he identifies the remains of servicemen who died in World War II, the Korean conflict and in Vietnam. He also helped to recover and is waiting to examine the remains of two sailors found in the turret of the USS Monitor, the Civil War ironclad ship that sank off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in a heavy winter storm in 1862. "It was very moving to think here's someone from 140 years ago who died in the service of our country, and we're going to identify this person," Kenney says. Career takes flight at O'HareToday, Kenney balances his forensic work with a successful pediatric dentistry practice in Park Ridge, Illinois. The practice's Web site features images of trains and railroading, a lifelong passion, Kenney says. Yet his journey from being a kid growing up in the Windy City to a dentist juggling the demands of suburban parents on the one hand and those of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the other, began not in a rail yard but at Chicago's O'Hare airport. There he worked first as a supervisor in passenger service for American Airlines, and later in ground-safety operations. In fact, he organized and helped stage the first live disaster response drill ever performed at O'Hare, then a relatively new facility that is now one of the world's busiest airports. At the age of 27, he decided to follow a different career path, and while he considered becoming a surgeon, he opted instead for dental school. Both surgery and dentistry, he reasoned, involve working with the hands, which he loves, and with his wife pursuing a graduate degree (they have since divorced), the demands of dental school seemed more manageable, he says. He took his first forensic dental course his senior year during a stint at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He had a chance to put what he learned into practice shortly after he graduated in 1977 from Loyola University School of Dentistry. Have morgue, will travel"My first major case was the American Airlines crash in Chicago in 1979, which remains the largest single airplane crash in U.S. history, including if you added all four totals of victims in all four crashes [on September 11, 2001]," he says. In that 1979 accident, a Los Angeles-bound DC-10 lost its left wing engine on takeoff and crashed into a field just northwest of the airport, killing all 272 people on board and three people on the ground. Although today there are federal disaster mortuary operations response teams in each of the 10 FEMA regions and fully equipped mobile mortuaries that can be dispatched to disaster sites within hours, emergency response at the time was much more haphazard, Kenney recalls. "Originally, every time there was an airplane accident the local medical examiner and the airline would cobble together enough pathologists, forensic dentists, maybe an anthropologist to process the remains and get them identified," he says. "We had to call on the local dental supply houses and put together our own morgue at the American Airlines hangar at O'Hare." The crash occurred about 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and by late evening Saturday their makeshift morgue was up and running, Kenney says. Real life drama not as seen on TVPrime-time melodramas such as CBS' "CSI," Fox's "Bones" and NBC's "Crossing Jordan" make forensic pathology look downright glamorous, and they manage to wrap each case up neatly in about 42 minutes (not counting commercials). But in real life, the work of identifying people from only a rag, a bone, a strand of hair, or a single bicuspid is gritty, painstaking and sometimes heartbreaking work, Kenney says. In the aftermath of the crash of an American Eagle plane in Roselawn, Indiana, in 1994, Kenney was working on site, performing body-part triage -- a gruesome task of sorting partial remains prior to identification. "We pulled a forearm out and the guy had a class ring from Ball State University, which was not the problem -- the problem was that he was a fraternity brother of mine -- the same fraternity crest on the top of his ring," Kenney recalls, with a catch in his voice. "I stopped for a minute, stood back and took a deep breath. Everyone said 'What's wrong, Jack?' and I said, 'Just give me a minute,' said a prayer, and went back to work." As a professional who cares for children and as the father of a 15-year-old son, Kenney says that the hardest cases he has to deal with are the children who die from physical or sexual abuse. "But when you're working at something like this you have to put a certain amount of professional distance between you and the job," he says. "As sad as the case may be, as difficult as it may be, you have to treat it professionally, because if you get yourself too emotionally involved in it you're not any good to anybody, because then you start to be less than objective in what you're doing, particularly when you're working on homicide cases." Among the most gratifying aspects of the work is the comfort it brings to families, he says. "So often it's so positive, because we are able to make these identifications, to get the remains back to their loved ones, to allow the families to have closure, to allow them to have their funeral service, even if the remains are as little as one tooth," he says. "In the DC-10 crash in Chicago, we had one person who was positively identified, and all we had was a part of the clinical crown of a tooth with a filling in. That was it." "That fellow went home." 
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