When you find a tooth with the characteristic concretion of tartar upon it, the first principle of surgery demands that you clean that tooth thoroughly. Go down beyond the line of the disease, go around the tooth thoroughly, and break up the diseased tissue, and apply tincture of myrrh, and in three days you will notice a marked improvement for the better, and if the patient takes proper care of the teeth the disease will not return. Practitioners should watch the teeth of the young people under their care, and see that the mouth is kept scrupulously clean and healthy.
In reply to a question, Dr. Riggs stated that whenever absorption goes on irregularly, unless the inflammatory action is extreme, it will sometimes absorb one or two bone-cells, and then skip one or two, and these last, being isolated, naturally die, or become necrosed to some extent. In treating this disease you must break up the line of disintegrated tissue. You must, as it were, transfer your eyesight to the end of the instrument, so that when you strike dead bone you will know it. Live bone will feel smooth and greasy.
It requires some years of experience to treat this disease properly, because you have not your eyesight to aid you, but must depend absolutely upon the sense of touch. With experience, however, you will learn to give a great deal of relief in one of the most annoying conditions to which the teeth are subject. The reason the profession are not familiar with the treatment of this disease is, they fail to recognize it until it reaches its third or fourth stage, and then they treat it by depletion and therapeutic remedies. Some treat it by stippling in acids underneath the gum, thinking thereby to dissolve away not only the tartar, but the necrosed bone. Another writer takes off patches of the diseased tissue, and another a strip of the gum, from wisdom-tooth to wisdom-tooth. This treatment he could only characterize as simply barbarous. The treatment of this disease is purely surgical. Any therapeutic treatment is to alleviate the pain and soreness immediately after the operation.
Dr. W. N. Morrison, St. Louis, referring to the method of treating pyorrhea alveolaris described by Dr. Riggs, said he cheerfully bore testimony to the importance of loosening the scales of tartar, and teaching patients the value of cleanness of the mouth. In his experience he had found that all instruments will occasionally fail to dislodge the deposit. In such cases he used as an assistant a little ring of para gum about an eighth of an inch wide. This was sprung on the tooth at the edge of the gum. If this is done and the ring allowed to remain a few hours, you will see an entirely new revelation, and you will readily be able to get at the tooth to clean it. He had found it advisable to give patients practical showing how the brush should be used.
SULPHUR AS A PRESERVATIVE AGAINST MARSH FEVER.
At a recent meeting of the Paris Academy, M. D'Abbadie called attention to some facts regarding marsh fever, which African travelers and others might do well to ponder. Some elephant hunters from plateaus with comparatively cool climate brave the hottest and most deleterious Ethiopian regions with impunity, which they attribute to their habit of daily fumigation of the naked body with sulphur. It was interesting to know whether sulphurous emanations, received involuntarily, have a like effect. From inquiries made by M. Fouqué, it appears that in Sicily, while most of the sulphur mines are in high districts and free from malaria, a few are at a low level, where intermittent fever prevails. In the latter districts, while the population of the neighboring villages is attacked by fever in the proportion of 90 per cent., the workmen in the sulphur mines suffer much less, not more than eight or nine per cent. being attacked. Again, on a certain marshy plain near the roadstead in the island of Milo (Grecian Archipelago), it is hardly possible to spend a night without being attacked by intermittent fever, yet on the very fertile part near the mountains are the ruins of a large and prosperous town, Zephyria, which, 300 years ago, numbered about 40,000 inhabitants. Owing to the ravages of marsh fever the place is now nearly deserted. One naturally asks how such a town grew to its former populous state. Sulphur mining has been an important source of wealth in Milo from the time of the ancient Greeks. Up to the end of last century the sulphur was chiefly extracted at Kalamo, but since that time it has only been mined on the east coast of the island. The decadence of Zephyria has nearly corresponded to this transference. The sulphurous emanations no longer reach the place, their passage being blocked by the mountain mass. Once more, on the west side of the marshy and fever-infested plain of Catania, traversed by the Simeto, is a sulphur mine, and beyond it, at a higher level, a village which was abandoned in the early part of this century because of marsh fever. Yet there is a colony of workmen living about the mine, and they seem to be advantageously affected by the emanations. M. D'Abbadie further mentions that the engineer who made a railway through this notorious plain preserved the health of his workmen by requiring them to drink no water but what was known to be wholesome and was brought from a distance.