Excerpt from A New Classification of Human Tooth Forms With Special Reference to a New System of Artificial Teeth

However, I am greatly encouraged in my belief that the bad Old customs of practice in dental prosthesis are about to receive a rude shock by my knowledge of the fact that in no country in the world are inferior methods, systems and machines so quickly dis carded or scrapped the moment their inferiority to something new is demonstrated and established, as here in America. American busi ness men found out long ago that it is the truest economy and the surest way to success to throw away an inferior method of produc tion, or a method which produces an inferior article, the instant better methods are discovered. That policy has made Americans the great est leaders in the business world. It has sent all the nations of the earth here to learn and copy American methods, and to -day you may find those methods being put into effect in the remotest corners of the world. So strong and vital 1s this influence of American progress that Guglielmo Ferrero, the distinguished Italian historian, says i is the one idea that has taken deep hold of the European masses during the last fifty years. It has certainly created a new outlook and a new spirit in the world. It has made men more self-reliant and given them a greater confidence in their own inherent capacity to subdue the stubborn and apparently antagonistic forces of Nature to human will. It is in that American spirit which says, in the language of the people, The best we can have is none too good, that I have come here to - day to ask you to discard, to throw away, to utter ly destroy and obliterate a system of prosthetic dentistry that has ex isted far too long, and to establish in its place something more in keeping with the reputation for progress and scientific achievement and character that our country enjoys in other fields throughout the world.

Dr. Ebersole, in a stirring and eloquent call, published in the Dental Summary last January, warned you that dentistry was not keeping in the van of American progress. If that is true in any degree of dental practice as a whole, then it is most emphatically true of dental prosthesis. And on that point I believe there are no two Opinions.

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