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233 HISTORY OF DEXTAL SUEGEKY

It is not difficult to understand why the ancient operations of transplant-
ing were so seldom successful. The necessity for aseptic or antiseptic pre-
cautions was not then understood, and probably the teeth transplanted did
not have the jiulps removed and the canals filled. Keplanting appears to
have been oftener successful, partly, perhaps, because the root of a tooth
would fit better when returned to its own socket than if transferred to the
socket of another tooth extracted to make a place for it. The success of either
operation was evidently very uncertain.
Within the past twenty or thirty years both operations have been revived
and another added, namely iuiplanting, which means the making of a new
socket and implanting a natural tooth in a place where a tooth has been losi,
for some time, in some cases for many years. So far as the writer knows
this latter operation was first brought to the attention of the profession by Dr.
Younger, then of San Francisco, since in Chicago, Paris, and other cities.
After practicing this operation for some time in San Francisco, Dr. Younger
described it at a meeting of the Odontological Society of Chicago and went
from Chicago to New York. He made clinical demonstrations of his meth-
ods of operating in both places. A suitable natural tooth having been selected,
the tooth and the territory in the mouth to be operated upon were sterilized,
incisions were made in the gum, but usually no gum was removed, the flaps
being needed for the new festoons, a socket was drilled into the bone of the
jaw as nearly the size, shape and depth required for the root of the tooth as
practicable, the new tooth inserted (of course, having had its pulp removed
and the pulp chamber and canal filled) and rigidly fastened to the adjoin-
ing teeth. Of course, the most careful aseptic precautions must be observed
throughout. A considerable number of men have practiced all three of these
operations occasionally. They would be done much oftener if it were not
so usual for replanted, transplanted and inplanted teeth to be lost in a few
years, from six to nine years most commonly, by the absorption of their roots.
Probably there may be exceptional cases of longer durability, and the writer
has one case which is believed to be doing service now which was implanted
about twelve years ago. This is an upper lateral incisor.
Dr. Louis Ottoffy implanted two teeth at a clinic of the Illinois State
Dental Society, in 1887, and Dr. W. N. Morrison, of St. Louis, replanted a
lower molar at a clinic of the same society a few years later, and all three of
these operations are recognized practice, resorted to by many operators when
peculiar circumstances and conditions render them especially suitable. Tiiey
are, however, rare and unusual operations because the cases are rare in which