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me into difficulty, too, with a patient of mine who happened to ;
be visiting him. He found an exposed pulp, I suppose, in a
bicuspid, or one that was so nearly exposed that he destroyed
it aimd had trouble with it. He returned the patient to me,
stating in a note that he had gotten into trouble with the
tooth—an abscess had formed that would not heal. I found
he had lost a pledget of cotton through a broad, open root-
canal. I cut through the tissues and got out the cotton. I
cut ofT considerable of the root and filled it with gutta-percha,
but I lost the tooth some six months afterward. Possibly
if the circumstanices had been known that tooth might have
been tided along for a year or so without destroying the pulp,
giving opportunity for that foramen to be narrowed down.
It is a matter of which we should take careful note and be
as careful as possible not to destroy pulps before the roots
are comipleted.
Now, this is sometimes a horrible thing—a patient comes
in to us with a badly expo'sed pulp in an important tooth
we know from the age of the patient and the usual history of
these cases that it is impossible for us to remove the pulp
and make a serviceable root filling, and to extract the tooth
is a thing we very much dislike to do. But my advice to you
is not to undertake tO' do impossible things. If there is a
doubt we may make the effort before extracting the tooth,
but let the patient know what may be expected.
Caries of the Deciduous Teeth.

This is one of the most difficult subjects in dentistry.
Not that caries in these little teeth is in any wise different from
caries of the permanent teeth, but the conditions under which
we have to treat caries of the deciduous teeth are so very
different from the conditions under which we have to treat
caries in the teeth of adults. We have the child to deal with,
and occasionally the little child, for we may find caries be-
ginning in their teeth as early as two years old, and occasion-
ally I have seen it still earlier. When it occurs so early we
may feel certain that caries is going to be very severe and
that it will destroy the httle teeth quickly unless some rem-
edy that is effectual is used. And the question is, how are
we going to apply our remedy to the teeth of the baby?
None of us like to hurt a child; none of us like to perform
such an operation as seems to be required by force against

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