Page 364 - My FlipBook

HISTORY OF DENTAL SURGERY
3-i(i

Baker; an extraordinary instance of the force of hereditary principle, by
Solymau Brown; an aunouucenieut that the publishing committee had been
tendered the loan of a dental library by Mr. Eleazar Gidney, a dentist of
Manchester, England; a remarkable case of osseous union of the teeth, by
Eleazar Parmly; an article, copied from a medical journal, entitled ''Ana-
tomical Discovery—The Ligamentum Dentis," by J. F. Flagg, of Boston;
and a catalogue of Mr. Gidney 's library, some seventy-six volumes, em-
bracing nearly all the French and English dental publications of note.
This first number contained twenty-four pages. Taking it all in all, it
was a very creditable production, this first number of the first dental journal.
The second number was paged from 1 to 24, thus duplicating the paging
of the first. This error was corrected in the third number which begins
with page 49. The fourth number is embellished with a steel-plate portrait
of Jolm Greenwood, engraved by the renowned Roy Peintre, of Paris, whose
work is now much sought after by collectors. At the end of tliis number
is a list of subscribers, from which we learn that it had about one-hundred
and seventy-five subscribers taking five hundred copies. It was indeed a
very good beginning, and tlie projectors of the journal were very much en-
couraged. The seventh number is of special interest in that it gives a full
account of the organization of the American Association of Dental Surgeons,
not the first dental society organized, for several short-lived ones preceded
it, but the first to make an impress upon the profession, and to practically
demonstrate to dental practitioners the advantage of frequently coming to-
gether for the purpose of a mutual intercliange of experience. The proceed-
ings of the convention wliicli organized tlie society, and the society's con-
stitution and by-laws in full, seems to have so enlarged this number that
number eight was omitted ; numbers nine and ten were issued together, as
weve also numbers eleven and twelve. This completed the volume. None of
the numbers were dated. It is not probable that the undertaking was profit-
able: it was not expected to be. Its friends in New York made themselves
responsible for any financial loss the first V'ear.
It was part of the general plan of the publishers of this journal to re-
produce from time to time works which they considered meritorious ex-
ponents of dental science. It is to aid in this that Mr. Gidney loaned
them his dental library. These were not publislied as part of the journal,
but in connection with it as separate and complete works, properly paged
and indexed for binding apart from the periodical. Carrying out this idea,
appeared as first of the series, "The Natural History of the Human Teeth,"