The Gates Historical Society is proud to announce a presentation by Teresa Lehr on “Rochester’s Great Tonsil Massacre”. In 1920 Rochester industrialists and George Eastman, Harvey Burkhart DDS, and Health Officer Dr. George Goler convinced parents that “several thousand” of Rochester’s children were in dire need of “preventative surgery” to remove tonsils and adenoids, glandular “menaces” that they claimed were reservoirs where disease microbes incubated.