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HISTOKY OF DENTAL SURGERY 115

"Dentistry is a profession by universal acknowledgment. It has been
an organized science for more than a generation, and has been called a
'profession' by common consent by the cultured and uncultured, as well as
by its own practitioners.
'"Even the highest authorities in medical literature refer to dentistry,
not as the 'dental specialty of medicine," l)ut as a "profession.'
'"The designation of it as a 'profession" is not an assumption like that
of a barber, the dancing-master, or the itinerant phrenologist; it is entitled
to the distinction because the mastery of it as a science or an art involves a
considerable knowledge of many other sciences.
"Its resources are not only nearly all the sciences, but in an equal de-
gree nearly all the arts. Hardly an art from phunbing to sculpture, but
has its prototy])e in some branch of dentistry, and yet it is not a depart-
ment or a specialty of any one of them.
"While a large part of its processes are of a meciianical nature, it is not
a mechanical trade, inasmuch as a mechanical trade is governed by Jixed rules
and a routine of labor, in which each workman is a servile imitator of the
pattern given him, aiul can become master of his trade without any knowl-
edge beyond its details.
"The metliods of the painter and sculptor are the methods of the
mechanic, but portrait, figure and landscape painting and sculpture are
branches of fine art, and the vocation is a profession, not a trade. That
which dignifies the practice of dentistry, bringing it above ordinai-y me-
chanics, is tlie fact that the operations are performed upon living organisms;
and that wliich makes it professional is the knowledge of anatomy, pathol-
ogy, etc., which discriminates in directing the mechanical treatment. Den-
tistry is not a specialty of medicine, because its chief and predominating
characteristics are utterly unlike anything which is taught in medicine, re-
quiring for their successful perfornumce natural faculties and re(|uirements
that are entirely distinct from the practice of medicine. That which makes
dentistry as a science kindred to medicine as a science, is the fact that it
deals with a small, but important, part of the human economy. But tlie
equally great fact that its methods are entirely distinct, requiring special edu-
cation and special training, makes it an independent science and in no sense
subordinate to the other. Dentistry became an independent profession, not
through any spirit of rebellion against the medical profession, but from sheer
necessity. The fathers of dentistry in this country were graduates of medi-
cine, and hoped to dignify their vocation by grafting it upon medicine, and