Dr Rinseout

Abstract

Dr Rinseout sipped her tea and reflected on past times when dentists were required to be capable of independent practice, including doing surgical extractions from the day they qualified. She remembered when undergraduate training involved keeping details of the number of extractions and ‘surgicals’ each individual student had to do in order to qualify, in the times before dental ‘educationalists’ with their current ideas on ‘competence’ ruled the roost. In those days, students also had to do hundreds of fillings, crowns, bridges and at least ten root fillings before the Dean signed them up by for ‘finals’.