Page 24 - An essay on the diseasesof the jaws, and their treatment

2 AN ESSAY ON THE Hunter's opinion is erroneous, is further proved by the fact, that a similar disease occasionally effects the lower jaw, with respect to •which he is entirely silent. His proposed plan of perforating the partition between the antrum and the nose, as well as of opening the inside of the lip, is not only entirely useless in a curative point of view, but likely to increase the disease; and very probably such treatment would never have been successful, even in the first stage of the disease, had it not been combined with better remedies, which, however, from some unhappy prejudice, or erroneous principle, were considered as secondary means, and seldom adopted until the patient had pre- viously been subjected to painful and unnecessary operations. Mr. Fox regards the disease in the same light as Mr. Hunter; but, as he has taken a more extensive view of the subject, his obser- vations require fuller consideration. In his " Natural History, &c., of the Teeth," part ii., page 124, he says, " Inflammation in the antrum is often occasioned by diseases of the teeth, but it also occurs when the teeth are quite sound. Sometimes in examining the prepared bones of the head, one or more fangs of the large molares may be found passing into the cavity. In such a case, inflammation excited by a diseased tooth is speedily communicated to the membrane lining the cavity and causes suppuration." These views, which constitute the ground-work of his surgical treatment of such diseases, are unquestionably erroneous, which is the more surprising when we consider that they are contradictory to his own theory of the vitality of the teeth. The fangs of the large grinders, or, indeed, of any other tooth, never enter into the cavity of the jaw in the living subject, so long as they are possessed of vitality. Such appearances in ana- tomical preparations, result from the bony structure surrounding the points of these fangs having been destroyed by the boiling, maceration, or other processes, to which the maxillaj had been subjected in order to rid them of their soft parts. Whenever the fangs have passed into the cavity of the antrum, previous to death, they will always, together with their respective bodies, be found to have lost their vitality, the connexion between