Diseases of the Soft Structures of the Teeth and Their Treatment: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners

Excerpt from Diseases of the Soft Structures of the Teeth and Their Treatment

About the middle of the last century a complete change in the conception of the causes of disease and the subsequent administra tion of remedial measures for their eradication occurred, which must be primarily credited to the ingenuity of the master-mind of Rudolph Virchow (1821 His name will be forever indelibly engraved upon the annals of medical lore. The ready comprehen sion of the present possibilities within the domain of clinical path ology are made possible only by an intelligent study of his doctrine. The revolutionary change took place with the publication of his work, Cellular Pathology, in 1858. These lectures, as he stated in the preface of this classic in modern medicine, were particularly intended as an attempt to offer, in a better arranged form than had hitherto been done, a View of the cellular nature of all vital processes, both physiologic and pathologic, animal and vegetable, so as distinctlv to set forth what even the people have long been conscious of  namely the unitv of life in all organized beings, in opposition to the one-sided humoral and heuristical tendencies which have been transmitted from the mythical days of antiquity to our own times, and at the same time to contrast with the equally (hlc-sltlt'd interpretations of a grossly mechanical and chemical bias  the more delicate mechanism and chemistry of the cells.