Page 178 - My FlipBook

have gone on to middle life or to old age with these micro-
organisms growing continuously, and yet no caries whatever,
should lead you to study conditions very closely. I want to
impress upon you the necessity that you study conditions
from mouth to mouth in your future practice, for the lectures
that I will give you from this on will relate more to your
future practice and future study than to your present cHnical
study here in school. I recognize that the conditions for

study from mouth to mouth are not such here as you will find
in your practice after you go out from us. Your personal
interest for the patients in your private practice will be
greater. You will have families of children under your care
who will come to you from year to year ; they will grow up
under your care and you will have a keen personal interest
in them, not only in the w^elfare of those people as persons, as
children, as children of your friends, but you will have a keen
interest in what you can do for the welfare of the teeth of
those persons, and as they grow up under your care it will
become your duty to study the conditions from mouth to
mouth, from year to year. And success in directing them
aright and doing their operations in such ways as to benefit and
improve their condition will constitute the happiness of dental
practice. Success in the management of these conditions will
be the highest interest that you will have in dental practice,
imless. indeed, you make it simply a commercial operation,
work only for the dollars and cents, without regard for the
mterest and the welfare of your patients. Such a practice is
never a very happy practice ; such a practice is generally not
the most successful practice from the financial standpoint.

Acidity of the Saliva.

Generally, if we make examinations of the saliva in the
human mouth we will find it acid. -If we make examination of
the saliva upon rising in the morning we w'ill practically al-
ways find it acid. Take a bit of litmus paper, touch it wnth
the saliva anywhere in the mouth and it will be reddened
promptly. If we examine it immediately after breakfast we
will find that the acid reaction is very much less, and then
after the meal it will increase continuously until the next meal,
usually, and then again after the meal it will be very much less
acid, or perhaps neutral, and so on. The saliva as poured into

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