Catalogue of dental materials, furniture, instruments, etc., for sale / by Samuel S. White.

  • S.S. White Dental Manufacturing Company.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Catalogue of dental materials, furniture, instruments, etc., for sale / by Samuel S. White. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    Porcelain leeth. [The following chapter on Teeth is taken by permission from the tenth edition of Harris's Principles and Practice of Dentistry, edited by Professor P. H. Austen. Some additional illustrations have been introduced, accompanied by the necessary description. These additions have been submitted to the author, and met his approval. The foot-note on page 18 is ours. The illustrations will enable dentists practicing in cities and towns remote from dental depots to order, with some degree of certainty, styles, sizes, and shapes of teeth adapted to particular cases in hand. The numbers attached to the cuts are moulded on the reverse of the blocks.] As Pharmacy was once a part of Medical practice and instrument-making a part of Surgery, so the manufacture of Porcelain teeth was, at one time, confined to the dental laboratory. Until within the past twenty years, a practical knowledge of the Dento-ceramic art was considered an essential part of dental education. Galen com- pounded his celebrated Theriaca for two Roman Emperors; Pare and Wiseman made many of their surgical instruments; and necessity has compelled physicians and sur- geons in all ages to imitate these examples. But the medical and surgical world have, for many years, committed the manufacture of drugs and instruments to those who, by making it a special art, can produce far better results. The time has fully come when Dentistry should do the same with porcelain-work, for two sufficient reasons:—1. Manufacturers now offer to the Profession porcelain teeth in such variety of beautiful forms that not one dentist in a thousand could equal them. 2. Moderate proficiency in block-carving requires such an amount of preparatory training and of continuous experience, that the dentist's education and practice must suffer in the line of important duties which cannot thus be delegated to others. Hence .nearly, if not quite, all of the most skillful block-carvers engaged in the general practice of Dentistry have, since the year 1850, one after another given up this art which it cost them so much to acquire. For these reasons, and also because the management of a porcelain furnace cannot be taught in books, we shall not attempt in this chapter to give a full and didactic exposition of the manner of making porcelain block or single teeth. Those who desire such knowledge, with a view to making it a specialty, require that which it no longer comes within the scope of a work on the Principles and Practice of Dentistry to teach. There is, however, on the part of all students, and probably of most practitioners, a desire to know the composition of dental-porcelain, and to have some idea of the manner in which a few earthy materials and metallic oxides are made to assume such beautiful forms. Some knowledge of the component parts of porcelain is essential to a correct understanding of the necessity for their admixture, as well as of the effects thus pro- duced.