T

HIS paper has been written with a

view to giving to the general practitioner a clearer conception and broader vista of those complicated and obscure procedures which are generally classed as minor oral surgery.

SPECIALIZATION AND ITS FUTURE.

With the broadening of dental science, from the purely mechanical handicraft of the past to the present evolution of a multitude of specialties that have sprung up like mushrooms on the dental horizon, ramifying and anastomosing as they do with biological, chemical and medical sciences; adding to this the frantic and persistent knocking of the medical profession at our door to assist them in diagnosing and eradicating diseases of the mouth that have been found to have such great potentialities in undermining their patients' health and vital forces, the dental practitioner has suddenly

DENTAL COSMOS, Vol. lxvi, January 1924.

awakened to the realization of the fact that he is lamentably and totally unprepared to grapple with the situation.

This condition of affairs has given rise to the creation of specialists in different branches of dentistry, to whom dentists may, in their despair, apply for advice and assistance.

This tendency for specialization will grow in intensity as the years roll by, until the present generation of dentists. and the many antiquated, commercial college factories of the present, with their antiquated staffs of instructors, will disappear from the arena, and a new type of oral specialist, the stomatologist, trained on a broader basis in all medical and biological sciences, will be created to supplant them. Until then, no medical or dental practitioner can well afford to practice his profession without at least keeping himself informed of those possibilities that the specialty of oral sur

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