A Suggestion. [Volume: 2, Issue: 10, May, 1861, pp. 535-538]

A SUGGESTION.

535

A SUGGESTION.
BY PROF. J. RICHARDSON.
WHEN we affirm that it is legitimately a part of the mission of those
now engaged in the cultivation of dental science to educate the medical
profession in regard to many important points relating to general practice, we assume that the truthfulness of the expression will justify its
apparent egotism.
The practice of medical men, with rare exceptions, reveals, almost
daily, a lamentable want of appreciation of those important pathological
indications so frequently furnished by diseased conditions of the dental
organs, as well as failures to recognize the positive dependence of serious
and oftentimes fatal maladies upon these primary sources of morbid
action. That this is so, is no just disparagement of the medical practitioner, for there are obvious reasons why he should be at fault where the
teeth are concerned. His vindication is complete in the fact that the
present instrumentalities employed as means of imparting a medical education afford no adequate opportunities for the acquirement of the truths
and facts so amply revealed, by observation and experience, to our own
profession. The medical student during his term of pupilage is restricted
to such sources of instruction as, by the usages of the faculty, are presented to him, and these are comprehended in the oral instructions of
preceptors, the teachings of medical text-books, and in medical lectures
and hospital clinics. In the office of his preceptor he makes no progress
in a knowledge of our department beyond what he may glean from his
books. The preceptor rarely repairs, by study, the defects of his own
education in respect to the teeth, and he could not reasonably be expected
to impart information to his pupil of which he was not himself possessed.
However diligent the student may be, he will advance but little beyond a
somewhat meagre knowledge of dental anatomy and histology by consulting any strictly medical treatise that is likely to fall in his way; and
as to dental pathology, all accessible information is chiefly embraced in
accounts of the local and constitutional disturbances incident to teething.
The multiform affections connected, either immediately or remotely, with
diseased conditions of the teeth are practically ignored. Neither will he
find, in the elementary works which are accessible to him, any facts worthy of attention concerning dental therapeutics or hygiene. Thus the
medical student passes from his preceptor and office studies almost wholly
unconscious of any truths in dental science that would serve him any useful purpose in practice. He next enters a medical college, and here, as
elsewhere, whether in attendance upon didactic lectures or hospital clinics,
the same silence prevails upon this important specialty; and, finally, with
the indorsement of the school, he goes to his field of labor profoundly