Page 141 - My FlipBook

THIRTEENTH LECTURE.

Dental Caries.
We want now to begin the study of dental caries. I
have had a design in putting this off until this part of your
course. I think that we can study caries to better advantage
for several reasons. First, it is one of the difficult studies
in your course, one of the subjects that is most difficult to
understand in its minutiae. You have come more into the
habit of study and your interest has been aroused. At least
I hope it has. But particularly you have had the observa-
tion of caries as it exists in the mouth, as you meet with it.
Further, most of you are now busy with patients and can
be observing things that I describe, and you can be con-
tinually referring to your own personal experience in the
observation of caries as we go along, fitting the descriptions
that I may give to what you have seen or may see in the
mouth. Now this I want you to do continually, for that
which I describe is that which occurs in the mouth—if I
do my duty—and by following these descriptions with your
personal observations of caries you will understand it more
readily and be particularly watchful as to the causation of
caries that you understand it. Remember that your prac-
tice in filling teeth will be based upon your knowledge of
caries, of its nature, of its methods of attack, and of its
method of progress. There must be a natural and logical
sequence between our knowledge of this process of caries
and the methods which we use to combat its progress, and
it is to this that I want to ask your attention particularly
this morning and during the progress of our work upon this
subject, beheving it to be the most important subject con-
nected with your work. Indeed, most of the diseases with
which we come in contact in the mouth arise directly as a
result of caries. A tooth decays until the pulp is reached or
nearly reached ; then, in consequence of decay we have an
inflammation of the pulp, then a suppuration of the pulp,
then death of the pulp, then follows alveolar abscess and
all of that train of diseases—a direct result of caries. Caries
of the teeth is the cause of this whole train of diseases which
occupies so much of our time. Then we should understand

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