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HISTORY OF DENTAL SURGERY 407

moutbs in each year. Tliere existed also an unfortunate provision giving to sueh as had
been in dental practice for several years previously a credit of one year (four mouths.)
These four months to him who was late in reporting were still furtlier shortened, so that
the period of study in such cases amounted only to weeks instead of years and months.
Under these circumstsances it became possible to foreigners, and especially Germans
without regard to preliminary education, to travel to America and to return in a few
weeks with a doctor's degree. As the evidence of having been in dental practice for
several years was in most cases not difficult to establish, it appears that the necessary
care to prove the value and genuineness of such practice was not always taken over there.
Aside from these unfortunate eouditions, there arose from time to time institutions
which without any curriculum sold diplomas (Doktortitel), and forsooth these found
their best customers in Germany. In the neighborhood of four hundred such diplomas
are said to have been disposed of in Germany. In recent days the foreign relations com-
mittee (of the ^National Association of Dental Faculties), with Dr. Barrett at the head,
and above all the American consul, Woerman, in Munich, have proceeded right sharply
against these diploma factories, and there is reason to hope that we shall be free from
these institutions and that their leaders may not escape deserved punishment. That our
American colleagues are ready to make a sacrifice to accomplish this aim is indicated by
the fact that at a meeting in Jlilwaukee thirteen thousand, and later again, four tliou-
sand marks were contributed for tlie purpose of prosecuting these tliploma swindlers.* * *
How difficult it is to su]ipress such a diploma factory is indicated by the fact that a
well-known factory, the Independent Medical College of Chicago, possessed not less than
twenty-four charters and manufactured thirty-six different doctor titles. As soon as one
charter was taken away from it, it could enter another name and manufacture further.
This factory is supposed to have sold over a thousand doctor degrees at prices ranging
from five to five hundred dollars. When one charter was withdrawn it quickly rose again
under the name of the Cosmopolitan Medical College. The dentists over there are as
little responsible for this as the dentists here are for the much greater disgrace that so
many purchased titles are carried here. A man who sells a title is not as contemptible as
he who knowingly purchases and carries a false title. In Germany we have no ground
whatever to be proud of our four hundred purchased titles, and it is the duty of those
associations which are engaged in matters concerning professional standing to strive in
the direction that most of these purchased diplomas should be exposed and their holders
punished. » *
But these diploma factories did not in any way influence the development of dental
science in America. The profession as a whole has scarcely been in any manner affected
The circumstances mentioned that on the part of acknowledged schools diplomas
by it.
were issued after a very short period of study and without reference to preliminary edu-
cation were looked upon as a great evil. The American dentists who practiced in Ger-
many filed their complaints repeatedly in the meetings of the American Dental Society
of Europe, especially during the time when I presided, in the beginning of the '80 's.
against those schools which conferred their diplomas in a careless manner; at the same
time a more thorough course of dentistry and more severe examinations were demanded
in America itself.
At this period arose two organizations which are destined to exercise an influence
upon the development of dental educational matters in America—the National Association