Page 194 - My FlipBook

up very wide differences between the two cases. But we
may fill for the one, if we can get conditions favorable, just
as well as for the other, and fillings will stand just as well,
if as well made, in the child as in the adult. The difficulty
is to make them as well.
v'Now, when these studies were given to the profession
they were regarded as revolutionary, and good men who
had been accustomed to the idea from their youth up that
there were great differences in the. amount of lime salts
in teeth, rebelled against the results found in these studies.
Well, this gave rise to some argument, or more statement,
perhaps, than argument. A very little notice of it will
be sufficient. Charles Tomes, who among the dentists of
England is most relied upon as a scientist, perhaps, of any,
said in effect in a meeting of the British Odontological So-
ciety that these results were so out of common with all our
notions of .the subject that they could not be accepted, but
from the character of the studies as detailed they could not
be simply passed over; and he there promised that he would
undertake the re-examination of the subject on similar lines,
and he had no doubt that the re-examination would dis-
prove the results. At another meeting of the association,
a number of months later, Mr. Tomes reported to the asso-
ciation that he had selected some typical cases and made
the examination as to the amount of lime salts in the teeth
of each, and was surprised to find that his results corrob-
orated mine, and that, so far as he could see, for the pres-
ent the results would have to be accepted as substantially
correct, and that we would be compelled to find some other
explanation of differences in the liabiHty of the teeth of
different persons to caries. So the matter rests to-
day. We are finding, as I have detailed to you, that there
are other means of explaining these differences coming to
light, and that we may expect in the not far distant future
that these will take material form and be more satisfactory
than the explanations we have had previously.
Now, gentlemen, the observations upon which these de-
ductions had been based were correct. You will see as
you go out to practice, you are seeing here in the infirmary,
that the observations upon which these deductions had
been based were correct. The difficulty was not with the

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