Page 51 - An essay on the diseasesof the jaws, and their treatment

DISEASES OF THE JAWS. 29 while the greater part has been transformed by healthy granula- tion into a strong bony ridge, frequently maintaining a height nearly on a level with the sockets of the remaining anterior and posterior teeth of the same side.* But, as regards every beneficial effect which has been asserted to result after the excision of the crown of teeth from the remain- ing stumps or roots, and particularly as to their possessing a power of granulation, it is hardly necessary to observe, that such asser- tions are entirely unfounded and erroneous, and in total opposi- tion to all sound physiology and pathology, as well as to observa- tion and experience. Indeed, were such injudicious and unnatural treatment in dental surgery to be extensively adopted, we might certainly look forward not only to a considerable augmentation of all kinds of diseases of the teeth, and their gums and sockets, but also of this terrible malady of the maxilla3. Fortunately, however, this treat- ,ment is so evidently absurd, and its inconsistency with all good surgical principles so glaringly visible, to all who are in any degree acquainted with the most common and simple physiological and pathological facts concerning the parts involved in such an opera- tion, as to render it quite undeserving of further refutation, had not even the principles of the operation been already perfectly refuted by all the most important facts and arguments maintained throughout my " Principles of Dental Surgery," but more espe- cially in part ii., chap. 2. " On the morbid effects of dead teeth, and stumps, and roots of teeth," to which I must refer the reader for a more extensive inquiry into the subject.f • For the perfect completion of this process, and the formation of sound gum, a period of one month additional must be allowed for every ten years of the patient's life after the age of twenty-one. t The following passage from the work referred to in the text, contains a summary of the author's views on this subject: " The unfortunate manner in which most of the authorities and writers on dental surgery have confounded causes with effects, and effects with causes, or in other words the morbid effects produced by complicated caries with those occasioned by dead teeth ; and the apparent similarity between the symptoms accompanying simple caries and those of dead teeth, seem to have induced them to attribute all those primary diseases of the mouth and those painful symptoms which dead teeth produce upon the general system, to the living diseased teeth only. " In consequence of this surprising misconception of the real causes, such