Plastics and plastic filling : as pertaining to the filling of all cavities of decay in teeth below medium in structure, and to difficult and inaccessible cavities in teeth of all grades of structure / by J. Foster Flagg.

  • Flagg, J. Foster (Josiah Foster), 1828-1903.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Plastics and plastic filling : as pertaining to the filling of all cavities of decay in teeth below medium in structure, and to difficult and inaccessible cavities in teeth of all grades of structure / by J. Foster Flagg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    ^lie favorable auspices of hearty encouragement from profes- sional elders for whom I had the highest respect; whose attain- ^^ ments as practitioners were unquestioned, and whose allegiance to dentistry was undoubted. It has been a long, and sometimes tedious, path which I have trodden, but the interest has been ever increasing, and the glean- ings from the way-side have proven to me, and to thousands of my fellow-creatures, productive of an ample harvest of mutually satisfactory results. During the first six years, progress was naturally slow, but at the expiration of that period I had obtained such data, as that the prosecution of experiments seemed not only warrantable, but to be demanded. As I was early educated to the value of a record I desired, as a preliminary to long continued, further work, that the con- clusions which had been obtained should be recorded^ that they . could be referred to, be the outcome what it might. To this end, I proposed, as the subject for discussion at the meeting of the Pennsylvania Association of Dental Surgeons, held March 12, 1861, the consideration of the so-called osteo plastic materials for filling teeth. Although the subject was not so stated, the discussion was, under direction, confined to the then new oxy-chloride of zinc. As / had proposed for that meeting, I asked my friend Dr. C. Newlin Pierce to propose amalgam as the subject for the next meeting, April, telling him that I desired particularly to obtain a general ex- pression of opinion in regard to that material, and also wished to place myself upon record for an especial purpose. Eeference to the discussion of that subject as found in the Cosmos for May, 1861, page 548, will show that I had not only the results of my own six years of observation, but the markedly favorable views of the members toward amalgam, to sustain me in a continued series of investigations in connection even with that hitherto questionable compound. This was, to me, a matter for congratulation, as I was then about to commence a gradual increase in relative proportion of plastic fillings to those of gold, and it became important that this increase should be definite in materials as well as in degree. I therefore decided upon amalgam, gutta-percha stopping, and