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PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY THE MEDICAL SOCIETY OF THE COUNTY OF KINGS.
JOSEPH H. RAYMOND, M. D., ALEX. HUTCHINS, M. D., GLENTWORTH R. BUTLER, M. D., JOSEPH H. HUNT, M. D., FRED. D. BAILEY, M. D.
VOL. II. BROOKLYN, N. Y., AUGUST, 1888. NO. 2.
PAIN, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ITS DENTAL RELATIONS.
Read before the Brooklyn Dental Society, May 28, 1888.
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:—Some months ago, when sitting in the operating-chair of your Chairman of the Committee on Subjects, he asked me if I would not read a paper before the Brooklyn Dental Society. In the helpless condition in which I then was, with literally a gag in my mouth, robbing me of the prerogative of free speech, and under the shadow of a formidable mallet, I somewhat timorously signified an assent. Under those circumstances I know of few men who would have had the moral and physical courage to have resisted such an appeal. When in the course of his further practices, he asked me what my subject would be, I promptly replied by mentioning the thing then most vivid in my mind: Facial Neuralgia.
I hardly realized my rashness and what I had undertaken, until I received your printed bulletin of subjects. But it has seemed to me on further thought that we might perhaps spend an hour profitably together in comparing notes about that borderland of facts and problems, which you touch on the one side as dentists and I on the other as physician. And I trust you will be lenient with me in your judgments if I go astray in my talk, and I pray you to remember that we doctors labor under great disadvantages compared with you dentists, contrasting the width and vagueness of our territory of research with the precision and accuracy of yours. I have again and again envied the exquisite dexterity and the certainty of adapting means to ends which I have seen exhibited by members of your profession, and vainly longed for the same in my own. But on the other hand, I think it may justly be urged that the dentists have not contributed as much to the general stock of knowledge, especially to the solution of disputed questions of pathology, such as the relation of micro-organisms to disease, as their unrivaled opportunities for observation would allow.
