Page 64 - My FlipBook

34 HISTOIIY OF BEiXTAL 8UEGEEY

ally, for bestowing special eare and concern for the patient's comfort in the
endeavor to supply useful artificial substitutes for the portions removed
or amputated, which is unlike other surgeons, who are perfectly satisfied with
the comjjletion and success of their operations, and who make it no concern
of theirs to see that the patient is properly equipped with suitable and com-
fortable artificial substitutes for amputated portions of the body, but leave all
this to the care and concern of the patient himself.

PIERRE FAUCHARD.
In the preface to the book itself, written by Fauchard, he observes that
it was to be confessed the department of surgery which is concerned with tlie
diseases of the mouth had up to that time been principally neglected, al-
tliough surgery in the main had arrived to some degree of completeness
and important discoveries had been made in anatomy and in manners and
methods fif operations. There had been a numlier of learned and curious ob-
servations brought to light, and yet dentists could not at that time find much
assistance in the direction of teaching them how to operate.
"When writers like L'rbanus Hemard and B. Martin mention the teeth
and their diseases at all, they do not go into details." Fauchard says. "The
former wrote a book entitled, "Kesearches in the IJeal Anatomy of the Teeth,"
and of the nature and characteristics of the same" and gave some of the
diseases to which the teetli are subject ; the other, who was an apothecary to
his highness, the prince, gave us a dissertation upon the teeth, which was
printed by Thierry in Paris, in 1G79, in which he described the structure of the
teeth, their diseases and remedies with considerable system. Otherwise we do
not know of a public nor of a private course in surgery in which the theory
of diseases of the teeth is treated circumstantially, which is so necessary for the
healing of the diseases which concern them and the parts which surround
them."
Thus he was the first writer to suggest the use of broader education for
dentists.
"While the most renowned surgeons do not pay any attention to this
part of their art, or at least do not cultivate it with any particular interest,"
Fauchard continued, "Tt is due to their neglect that people without ex-
perience and without theory have assumed, without instruction and without
method, to practice it.
"Only a few rears ago in Paris our eyes were opened to this misuse. Since