Reply to the 'Additional strictures', contained in the first number of the Quarterly Medical Review, on the Principles of dental surgery, etc. : Containing various remarks on the teeth, especially on the perniciouseffects of tartar, and other causes of diseases of the teeth and gums / [Leonard Koecker].

Leonard Koecker

Date:: 1827

Credit: Reply to the 'Additional strictures', contained in the first number of the Quarterly Medical Review, on the Principles of dental surgery, etc. : Containing various remarks on the teeth, especially on the perniciouseffects of tartar, and other causes of diseases of the teeth and gums / [Leonard Koecker]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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The strictures are thus continued : ‘¢He (Mr. Koecker) leaves us, however, in no doubt as to his having carried improvements in that department, to a most mira- culous extent; and informs us, that he has now possessed himself of instruments of extraction, to the most enormous amount of eighty ; instruments for stopping, one hundred and seventy; and if we assume the same number for scaling and other operations, one hundred and seventy; we shall have the very wonderful num- ber of four hundred and twenty instruments. And the author even adds that, ‘he has always a great number at hand, ready to be adapted to peculiar caries.’ I contend that this is not legitimate reasoning. Is it not extraordinary that the writer should draw a conclusion so ridiculous, and so devoid of all dental judgment, that if eighty instruments are necessary for extracting, and one hundred and seventy for stopping teeth; consequently one hundred and seventy more must be required for scaling them and for other minor operations? Does not every one know, that for these last operations, much fewer instru- ments are wanted? The critic finishes his paragraph with the following re- marks : “The profession might probably have been able to glean something from his (Mr. Koecker’s) magazine of curiosities, if he had favoured us with the least glimmering of light, on the principles upon which any one of them was constructed ; but he acknowledges he is lost in the vastness of the undertaking, and prevented by the human re- flection expressed at page 345, that his apparatus, in consequence of its extent, and on account ofits great difference from what is gene- rally used, would not only be dangerous in the hands of the igno- rant, but its application would require some previous practical instruction, even on the part of the scientific Dentist.” Although I entertain the hope, that my manual may prove of some use to professional gentlemen, who are more impartial judges than the critic; still he may say, that I was lost in the vast undertaking of endeavouring to instil the least useful light into the minds of those of an equal capacity with hisown ; knowing too well, that in such hands my instruments might become dangerous weapons, and place in jeopardy the health and happiness of our fellow creatures. Such are the chief charges which my opponent has brought against me, and such is my defence. But I must give another illustration of excessive unfairness. In my volume I have treated at some length : ‘ist, Of the natural history of the teeth and their relative parts: that is, of the gradual formation, and various structures and

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