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The New Professionalism
Address before the Indiana State Dental Society, 1914. Published in The Dental Summary, XXXV, 1915.
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I want to assure you that you are entirely safe from being bored by lengthy remarks from me. I am very, very happy to be here. It is always a very great pleasure to meet with our Indiana friends, for Ohio and Indiana have a great deal in common. I see I am to speak to you on “The New Professionalism,” and I want you to go to Berlin and see an incident that happened a few years ago, when one of the princes from Holland was visiting Berlin. The Emperor of Germany, desiring to awe the prince, and to show him the mighty army of the German Empire and the splendid nation, to convince him that he could sweep down and take all of Holland, and in order that he might properly impress him, had one of his crack regiments march up in front of this prince, who was the highest representative of that land, and after they had marched by, he turned to the prince and said, “Can you beat that in Holland?” And without any cynicism or smile he said, “Yes, we can.” And the Emperor of Germany was miffed at that reply and hurt. He said, “Bring up our crack regiments and march them past this man. He dares to insult us by inferring that they can beat this regiment.” And so they marched up before this prince some more of their crack regiments, some that are never brought into public parade, and when they marched by the Emperor cheered those lusty fellows and said, “Can you beat that in Holland?” And with the same stoic countenance the prince replied, “Yes, we can.” And the Emperor was more indignant, and he said, ” Bring out my personal body guard. They have never yet been brought out for parade, but I want this man to see a regiment in which every man is six feet six inches tall;” and as that splendid regiment went by the Emperor thrilled, and said, “Can you beat that in Holland?” And the young prince said, “Yes, we can.” The Emperor said, “What do you mean?” He said, “We can flood Holland seven feet deep.”
We find as we study men and forces in this world that there is one force that is as much larger than all other personalities as that force and that engulfing ocean is greater as compared with those feeble German soldiers, and that one overwhelming wave is Personality; and you show me the personality that has in it the possibility that God has put in the possible range of one human life and soul, and I will show you something just as irresistible as is found in that deluge of water from the ocean. Look at our dental profession. I had the privilege of starting in a dental office with one who was supposed to be the best dental practitioner in a small town, and one of his first instructions was, “I want you to be very careful and not give away any of my ideas to these other men in town. They are nice fellows. You can go with them, but remember that the secrets of this office are ours.” We have in our dental history one of the most beautiful transformations of that narrow, constricted Personality that you can find anywhere. We find ourselves growing out of it, just as an animal grows into a new form, taking an entirely new life; and we do also find, in the very nature of our practice, something that tends to make us narrow. Can you not see that dentist who was so hurt when somebody doubted him, he couldn’t stand up and trust himself when he thought someone else doubted him? Haven’t you seen the man who, when he thought someone had said an unkind word or falsehood, would deal in the same material? Haven’t you seen in our profession that tendency for a man to get dreamy, and finally let those dreams come to be his master, and as they came to be his master, he finally made a theory like the picture of a cobweb so far as his proficiency was concerned? Haven’t you seen in our profession, because we are kept away from the fresh air and the oxygen so much, that invigorates and makes new character, man after man pinched down until they did not have the characteristic resemblance to that forgiving principle? When we analyze our great city dental societies and find that there is scarcely a city in this country that has not been torn by dissension among its professional dentists, it appalls us. Just analyze it! It is nothing but the very thing I was speaking of–our men were not large enough to trust themselves when others doubted them. What does this mean? It means that as a profession we must first of all grow out of that constriction.
“If you can keep your head, when all about you
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
And make allowance for their doubting, too;
If you can wait, and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, not deal in lies;
Or, being hated, not give way to hating;
And yet not look too good nor talk too wise.
“If you can dream–and not make dreams your master;
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build them up with worn-out tools.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings,
And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss–
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will, which says you must hold on;
“If you can walk with crowds, and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor living friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the earth, and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a man, My Son.”
We have not begun to grow until we get large enough so that no man can hurt us, and we have never gotten strong until we are strong enough to acknowledge our own weakness. And, still more, we have no right to claim that we love truth until we love truth, even though it denies and contradicts what we have said, more than we love to have someone endorse what we have said when it is wrong. What does it all mean? It simply means that if we, as a profession, are going to grow into the great possibilities of life, we must have an entirely new vision or relation for the world. For a man like that there is a new job. It is fixing up the world. There is not any sacrilege in that, no unkind inference in that. The fact is, God has placed us here to fix up the world. I think sometimes, when I read of that question by the disciples, when they came to the Master after He had healed the little child of the centurion, wanting an explanation, and He said, “And greater things than these shall ye do,” saying it two or three times–Is it possible that a small human life, as we have it today, is doing or can do a greater work than these things Christ did?
I want you to follow through that type of personality that loves truth so much that it cherishes it more than anything else in the world, and you will see that practically all the benefits to mankind have come through that source. The death rate of Brazil today is thirty per thousand; of Indiana, fourteen per thousand, approximately. What does that mean? It simply means the difference in applied intelligence, and that simply means that somebody has been busy in gathering new truths in order that we might apply them. Think of what has been done in making over this old world! Fifty years ago the average life rate was twenty years; today it is nearly forty. Do you get the significance of that–the average lifetime nearly doubled in twenty years? The explanation is that someone had enough love for truth that he went after that one great element in order to help mankind. And we also find it where Doctor Emerson said we must go for it, and that is in the laboratory. While he acknowledged that clinical data might be valuable, he said it did not prove. We must go down to the crucible of exact analysis. When you take the scourges, and see that yellow fever went over the earth, and see that millions of people were wiped out by it, and today the earth is free from it, you see that character large enough to love truth more than anything else, and more than its own life, for the man that finally made the test for yellow fever by inoculation by the mosquito, gave his life, and did so cheerfully. When you take one after another of the great scourges like diphtheria, the cure for which in one year saves as many of the children of the United States as there are in all the schools of Indianapolis put together, you will know that it was brought about because somebody loved truth, and that love of truth, and that truth itself, is more mighty than anything else in the world.
Many references have been made to the opportunities in the dental profession. I wonder if any one in the dental profession has not got a large portion of that hunger and desire for truth that makes him wish to have it more than anything else in his practice. The fact that the dental profession has made contributions of something like $34,000 in fifteen months, in order that we might get more truth, is one of the best proofs we have that we have come into that heritage. The president has reminded me that he wishes me to tell you of the letters of encouragement we have been getting from men of great prominence in this campaign. Doctor Anderson, who is at the head of the Research Laboratory at Washington, commends in the very highest terms this movement. Another was a word from President Woodward of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, saying that he was more deeply impressed with the possibilities for good from this research work than by almost anything that had come to his attention during the past year. The dental profession has the opportunity to do just what Doctor Emerson has suggested, for he has brought to you the statement that vaccines as trusted in today are one of the weakest crutches we can lean upon. In that connection I want to say that the manufacturers of therapeutic products have been so eager to get on the market that there has scarcely been a month that they have not come to the commission and asked for its endorsement of some sort of vaccine for pyorrhea. Of course, the Commission cannot tolerate that. Doctor Billings, of Chicago, has said that he never saw a case of arthritis respond to vaccines. He has seen some respond to autogenous vaccine. We find ourselves a little in the position of the man who called for his attorney when he had been arrested and he said, “What can I do to get out?” The lawyer said, “What did you do?” “I did so and so.” He said, “You can’t be arrested for that.” And the man replied, “I didn’t send for you to tell me that. The fact is, I am in jail, and I want to know how to get out.” There are some facts that are just about as irresistible as that man’s position in jail, but when we realize that there is no such thing as contradiction of fact, we must understand that we may have only a part of the fact, and that vaccine treatment which produces, as he acknowledged, such splendid results, might be a therapeutic factor. There has been added to the unit of fact during the past few weeks one that is related to all that problem, and that puts a new face upon it. It is entirely possible to say that a large number of patients that Doctor Hartzell and his assistants have under their care have been improved in health, and that, not in months, but in a very few weeks, from a vaccine taken from a culture in the mouth, a very delicately selected culture, as over against one taken from a culture in which he has no faith. But the next step will be when you recognize that these germs may produce treatment therapeutically beneficial to these patients without proving that infection came from this origin. But in a few weeks Doctor Hartzell has, from a patient suffering from rheumatic arthritis, taken a pure culture, and injected that into animals, and produced characteristic arthritis in the animals. That has not been done before; that is a new clinical fact. It may be related to this whole problem. Truth is always properly related, and truths never conflict. In addition to that, they have produced myocarditis, endocarditis, affections of the aorta and abscess of the kidney. It is not conclusive that those patients have received infection from that source, but it is mighty suggestive.
I want to say something about the organisms to the dental foci from some other source. Within a week we have found in a tooth with a dead pulp a pure culture. That pure culture did not get in through the tooth. We haven’t differentiated it; it is probably a “grip” bacillus. It is entirely possible for an abrasion, a point of infection, to exist at the apex of the tooth, and the systemic infection come in, as the doctor suggests, through an ulcer on the appendix or from the tonsils. I have seen a child recently with an extensive necrosis with a culture identical with the culture taken from the tonsil when removed, and this involved much of the maxillary tissue on the right side. The suggestion is that it may be produced at the weak point, to which the culture may go from other parts of the body. Suppose the vaccine has approached that area from other parts of the body. As he suggested, we do not stop the conflagration by putting out the fire in the first barn. No; but there is in the principle of treatment, the suggestion, borne out by much data, that it is not sufficient to clear out the mouth, the incidental source of infection, but there is a source for getting that culture to treat that case with, not necessarily a dead culture, but one with attenuated virulence. One patient had been treated with vaccine, stock vaccine, and with a vaccine made from a culture from the tonsil, and did not respond, and yet that patient was home with her family in five weeks, responded to a culture taken from a dental abscess. Suppose the dental abscess itself had been obliterated by the extraction of the tooth without making the culture. Immediately you have the proposition which you cannot answer and I cannot. Would that patient have gotten well merely from the extraction? Was it the result of extracting that tooth that gave her immediate relief? My belief is something was added to her system by that culture, because other cases have come where the same condition was brought about, and not a tooth was removed. That patient has increased in weight from 135 pounds to 175 pounds, is in better health than she has been for a great many years.
The presentation Doctor Emerson brought us tonight is one of the most grateful things I have heard in a long time, because it emphasizes the necessity for exact methods of study, just the thing we are trying to get into our profession. I know of no way we can make great progress except by this exact method. This splendid exponent we have heard here will not allow even the best clinical evidence to be weighed in the balance, when we may make an exact computation. I thank you again, in the interests of this great profession, in its efforts toward research work, and I want to say to you who were not here today that the dentists of Indiana have come to the support of this work to the extent of subscriptions of $3,200, in addition to their former subscriptions. It is not for the people of Indiana to applaud that, but it is for the admiration of the entire country. I want to bring you the most cordial appreciation of the entire profession for your splendid co-operation.