June 2, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



813 



you young men who have studied dentistry 

 and have become proficient in the art 

 should think the making of teeth to be the 

 least of the purposes of your future life. 

 As in surgery, dentistry is conservative, 

 and you will serve man best if you will en- 

 able him to keep the teeth which nature 

 has provided. The physician of the fu- 

 ture as well as the dentist must be the 

 arbiter of good health, and good health 

 comes largely from good food and good 

 hygiene ; good food well masticated and 

 good hygiene well applied. 



The farmer furnishes the food, the 

 dentist secures its mastication, and the 

 physician formulates the laws of health 

 and helps to restore to the normal any dis- 

 eased organ of the body. The first thing, 

 therefore, which the physician of the future 

 must see to is the food supply, not that he 

 is expected to till the soil and produce its 

 fruits, but that he is to help in the great 

 work of restoring foods to their normal 

 state. 



To what lengths have the arts of adulter- 

 ation gone? There is no time to-night to 

 preach to you about the awful evils of food 

 adulteration, not only of its effect upon 

 health, but of its demoralizing effect upon 

 the honesty of commerce. It is a matter 

 of which the medical profession of this 

 country may be proud, namely, that as a 

 unit they stand committed to the cause of 

 pure food, to opposition to fake advertis- 

 ing, to the restoration of honesty in the 

 trade in food products, and to the elimina- 

 tion from foods of drugs which are useful 

 only in cases of disease. The great army 

 of dentists also in this country stand in the 

 same rank. They are aware, in fact, that 

 if the functions of an organ are suspended 

 the organ itself sooner or later suffers 

 atrophy, loses its power of functional ac- 

 tivity, becomes abortive in the course of 

 ages and rudimentary. Thus the great 



professions of medicine and dentistry in 

 the future will stand together to fight the 

 evils of predigested and prechewed foods. 

 Predigested food will cause the stomach to 

 shrivel and become finally only a rudi- 

 mental organ. Prechewed food will in the 

 course of ages produce a toothless race. 

 It is bad enough to lose one's hair, but for 

 heaven 's sake let us keep our teeth ! 



I do not care who makes the laws in this 

 country if you will let me furnish the 

 people with good teeth, nor who writes 

 the songs if I can help to keep the stomachs 

 in prime condition. It will be a sad day 

 for humanity in the future when pepsin 

 loses its savor and is furnished only by the 

 chemist and not by the secretory glands of 

 the stomach. See to it then that future 

 generations have something to chew and 

 something to digest, and* to this great end 

 much of the energy and ardor of the in- 

 vestigations of our future physicians and 

 dentists must be directed. ' 



The physician of early ages was a 

 magician and necromancer. The medicine 

 man of savage tribes is still practising the 

 art of incantation. It is a far cry to 

 ^sculapius, but before his day even dis- 

 ease was supposed to be the work of evil 

 spirits. In fact the most destructive swine 

 plague that we read about in the Bible was 

 caused by the devils which were cast out of 

 sick men, and these devils, taking posses- 

 sion of the swine, caused them to rush into 

 the sea and be drowned. 



The age of magicians in medicine was 

 followed by that of the empiric, which was 

 a great advance and led to the foundations 

 of real science in medicine. The empiric 

 we still have with iis and always will have 

 as long as man has idiosyncrasies. We 

 can never tell in any individual case what 

 the result of any certain treatment will be 

 because we can never properly estimate the 

 value of the individual idiosyncrasy. 



