Nearly twenty years have passed since the American Medical Association created a Section on Dental and Oral Surgery, now the Section on Stomatology. Since its beginning, this section has made admittedly valuable contributions to stomatology and has exerted a wide influence in elevating the dental branch of the medical profession. While dentistry, or stomatology as it is now more appropriately termed, was a very old branch of medicine, still, as the oath of Hippocrates shows, lithotomy was the earliest specialty to separate from the medical profession. Dentistry, however, during the last three centuries, had become a simple mechanical occupation practiced by blacksmiths, traveling quacks, barbers and "wise women." As many of the men, educated as barber-surgeons, like Ambrose Paré, advanced themselves and the science of surgery by their skill and study, so many of the men trained only in the mechanical part of dentistry in its limited sense did much