DENTITION DISEASES. 
411 
any man think he knoweth a thing, he knoweth nothing yet as 
he ought to know;” and any of us who has had much practice, 
and, in fact, the longer we practice the more we find this Scrip¬ 
tural passage to be an infallible axiom, and if any man in the 
profession to-day has made more mistakes than I he should be 
in durance vile or wearing the stripes instead of being at large. 
But as I happen to know many so-called V. S., who are con¬ 
stantly making irreparable mistakes without any attempt at be¬ 
ing scientifically informed or educated, and with whom I have 
small sympathy, that to-clay I came before you, my professional 
brethren, if my experience related here points you to a danger 
signal, don’t go that way, as Sir William Gull replied, when 
asked if he did not consider animal experiments cruel: he con¬ 
sidered no cruelty compared with that of the cruelty of ignor¬ 
ance. 
Therefore, let us consider together a few of the more common 
diseases of the teeth, laying aside all theory as far as possible. 
The ones I most commonly meet with are caries, pulpitis, peri- 
cemintitis, alveolar abscess, traumatic inflammation of tooth and 
its accessories, with cysts, etc., in sinuses, gangrene of tur¬ 
binated with complications and such as ophthalmia, dental 
cough, constitutional disorders, etc. Frey has well said that 
tooth development is one of the most difficult tasks that em¬ 
bryologists have to contend with. He should also have said 
that no organ of the body has such a feeble hold on life as the 
dental pulp; neither is any substance so prone to irreparable de¬ 
struction, for, without an active and normal pulp, we cannot have 
a normaly developed tooth. Certainly there must be a quantity 
of nutritive material, and as to quality this should also be nor¬ 
mal. These constitutional troubles we often have, and, less the 
magnitude; about as difficult to understand the etiology as osteo¬ 
porosis and many times likewise this treatment. 
There are many influences which may act upon the develop¬ 
ing tooth, as this is the time when the entire system is develop¬ 
ing, and we know there are other parts of the body at this period 
that may be temporarily encumbered by incipient diseases. The 
