Dr. Cook: And if so, I would like to ask where the difference between dental education and medical education begins; where the special training begins? Dr. SPALDING: The idea is that those branches that are common to both and that are taught in both dental and medical schools are, or should be, taught equally well in either. But they are taught and studied with reference to the future occupation of the pupil. Take chemistry as an example. The drift of instruction and study in dental chemistry is quite a different thing from that which is pursued when medicine is to be practiced, and so of the rest. Our students cannot master any of the sciences, and hence the knowledge they acquire of each should be that which will best serve them in the profession they have chosen. Dental schools teach the medical and other sciences with reference to dental practice; while medical schools shape their courses with reference to the practice of medicine. If all can be learned, very well; but if not all, then the things that are most essential. Dr. ALLPORT: Great stress has been laid upon preliminary education. Of course, a preliminary education is essential to the study of medicine or dentistry, but what is more preliminary to the study of dentistry than a medical education. One thing more. I want to ask these gentlemen who cast slurs upon a medical education as being of no consequence, what would they have done without the medical profession in the first place? They say it is only an ornament, but as a profession we have few text-books. Dr. ATKINSON: Thank God. Dr. ALLPORT: What we have are from the medical profession. If they are not the best, where are they? Who has ever written one but a medical man? Dr. ATKINSON: A dentist exclusively. Dr. ALLPORT: Professional or scientific, they do not exist to-day; and the foundation of our practice is from medical text-books. Dr. ATKINSON: How about Taft and Richardson? Dr. ALLPORT: I know to what the gentleman refers. Taft and Richardson are medically educated. But I repeat, if we are going to ignore and cast aside medical books, we have nothing to take their places. Dr. ATKINSON: We don't want anything to take their places. Dr. ATKINSON: That is not it, either. Dr. ALLPORT: That is a kind of argument that will not answer. They are the best books we have. They are written by medical men. They may have been written by dentists, but they were medical men, nevertheless. Yet people speak slightingly of medical books and medical education. There is no man to-day who is a scientific dentist who does not depend upon a medical education, whether he calls it by that name or not. Why is Dr. Atkinson what he is? We all know what he is very well, and we respect him most highly for his scientific attainments; we sit with profound attention when he speaks; we are aware that he is skilled in the treatment of oral and surgical diseases, and we are also cognizant that the basis of his special knowledge is founded in the science of medicine, procured from medical text-books; and without this medical education he would not have become the Dr. Atkinson he is to-day. Dr. ABBOTT: I have no doubt, from the remarks I have heard, that the gentlemen all think about the same. It strikes me very forcibly, however, that what are termed medical works are not, as a general thing, used in dental schools. What are used in dental colleges are scientific books, that no medical or dental college can possibly get along without and teach what it should. The foundation of all our education, so far as our profession is concerned, is anatomy. Without our knowledge of anatomy we would make very ordinary dental surgeons. Dr. SPALDING: There was no anatomy until there was operative anatomy. Dr. ABBOTT: That is true. I should call it surgical anatomy. That is the kind of anatomy we have to rely upon. Then comes physiology. The dentist cannot get along intelligently without understanding that. That is not medical. Works on physiology are not medical works; they are simply scientific works. Then we want some pathology, some chemistry. Those are the foundationstones of our specialty, and they are scientific. Now, when we come to the general practice of medicine, we have works upon the treatment of all diseases to which flesh is heir. These are strictly medical works. Then, in our own science of operative dentistry, we have all the works pertaining to that, for our special benefit. There is one thing certain, however: no man, whoever he may be or where he may come from, can get too much education. So the more we ask of a young man, the better will that young man be qualified to carry out his life-work. That is the reason why we commend this association of dental faculties for the steps which it has taken. I certainly feel that the steps have been great ones in advance, and that thereby we are put in a position to respect ourselves and to make others respect us. Dr. RHEIN: There is no question that the books treating of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and materia medica are scientific works, but if they are not also medical, I would like to know what are medical works. They really comprise all there is of medicine, and medical education begins and ends with these. Dr. ATKINSON: I have personally been called out, and my personal history has been referred to in this discussion. I want to eliminate all that, and to call to your minds the morality that lies in this question, which has been ignored by every speaker. They have not touched the real gist of the matter at all. Every example that has been given here of medically educated men being better dentists for the reason of their medical education, is a subterfuge and a falsity. A dentist is not a regular medical man by reason of his M.D., but by reason of the knowledge that he got aside from his efforts to get the M.D. Dr. ROBINSON: Afterwards. Dr. ATKINSON: It has been said that I am only a medical man because I was educated as a medical man. A man is not a medical man until he has learned from actual experience in the hospital and in actual practice. The mere title don't mean anything. Speaking of text-books, it is one of the best things that ever happened to us that we may have no mandatory text-books as a profession. That is where we stand higher than the medical profession. Speaking of education, you have probably heard me say, ad nauseam, that, if I had my way, I should first give a student a classical education; then I should put him through the best medical course to be had; and then I should matriculate him in the dental college; and before he finished there I should see that he was a good operator. We do not want in our profession men who are merely “toothcarpenters." The moral deficiency in the minds of such men is the thing we want to emphasize and push out. We want the moral responsibility to rest upon them, so that they shall know for themselves that they are right. That is not all. Some one has said that if we would win respect we must be self-respecting. Yet some of the greatest fools I ever saw have respected themselves the most. The men who are the least educated assume the most. Those who are disposed to be the most exclusive are sometimes the greatest ignoramuses. Those men who are determined to keep the boys away from the means of acquiring real knowledge are the very men who have false degrees. They think this fuss and feathers that has been spoken of is an ornament. God save the mark! I want no such ornaments. I would rather stand disenthralled and naked before heaven and earth, with nothing but my skin on, right side out, than have such an ornament as that. It is the patient, careful observer who is illuminated by the truth in nature that he records and tells to some brother, and they, by association, bring all their different contributions together. If we would do that and give our true perceptions of the righteousness of the matter, knowing what we were talking about, and not going off half-cocked at the first blush of the aspect of truth that always comes hind end foremost to us, we would be men; we would be as a light set upon a hill, that no man can hide or ignore! What is the source of our education to-day? Where do we get the Shekinah that has so beautifully illuminated our heads and hearts here? Did we get it from the text-books? What is medicine? It is nothing until you have sin. Medicine is nothing but the correction of a perverted activity. God knows how earnestly I have desired to apprehend the conditions of cases, that I might be of use and be made the savior of those who were suffering from maladministration of an assumed knowledge that the individuals who had given the poisons which had worked the mischief did not possess. Let us begin anew in this matter of education. Why when we have the means of illumination should we not begin de novo? What is education? It is not stuffing a man with the grace of God, and driving it into him, whether he will take it or not. It is the calling out, by the grace of the Creator, of the possibilities in each individual. Education-e duco-"I lead out!" Who is the "I?" It is the leading of the great I AM, who is the FATHER of us all, in whose munificent radiancy we live and move and have our being, mentally and physically. As I said, medication is the correction of a perverted current. They call this a pathological condition. I wish to God we could get rid of these hindrances in the way which have been artificially set up. Pathology is only deranged physiology. It must have been the inspiration of a swamp angel that suggested some of the things that we have in our system of dealing with ideas and processes. I want you to understand, when you are studying anatomy, that you are only studying second-hand physiology. Physiology is before anatomy, as type is before body and as faith is before all practice. Faith is the "substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen." That is exactly what we want to get now. We want to break down the middle wall of partition, get our Shekinah, and do what we do according to our sense of righteousness, so that what we do shall be without rebuke to our own consciences. If we do that, we need not fear the sayings of Mrs. Grundy. We want to hold the truth in righteousness. What was the damnation of the old school? It was that they tried to hold the truth in unrighteousness. Let us not waste time quarreling over textbooks. Louis Agassiz was a man sent from God to this world—to these United States of America. When he was asked, "What textbooks shall I have?" he told his questioner to take a scalpel and a fishing-net, go and catch something, and study the text-books of Madame Nature. Now, let us do that. Let us just ignore all this dead-weight that we have so long carried in sueing for recognition by the medical profession. If I have stated aught which is error, if I have stated anything that is foolish, unloving, unkind, anything that the highest morality of any of you can reject, then ask me any questions you please. Dr. FRIEDRICHS: I want to ask Dr. Atkinson only one question. He is evidently terribly opposed to text-books. Yet text-books are only the truths which men discover, written down. The truth is eternal; and when it is discovered, some one is going to put it in a text-book. Dr. Atkinson is himself writing a text-book. How can he oppose them so when he is writing one? Dr. ATKINSON: Simply for this reason. When I studied embryology, I found that there was a thing called a placenta, that for the time being was of vast importance to the foetus. But when the time came, through the evolution of the organism by the action of the functioning power, that the foetus was to receive its radiancy or energy by which it lives and moves through another apparatus,— namely, through the lungs,-then the child, at birth, sheds the plaNow, when he does that, for God's sake don't keep it on him. My objection to text-books is that they bear that relation to us in our onward progress in science. They are embryonal, and we have outgrown them. That is my reason. centa. |