Objectives and Organization of the Caries Control Workshop

Abstract

An alumnus of the University of Michigan* (and we here in Ann Arbor always are partial to the statements of graduates of the University of Michigan) stated recently that, to a considerable degree, the history of man is the history of myths. Myths, probably to most of you, suggest the folkways of primitive peoples and of ancient civilizations. I think that you will find, however (you will if you join the members of the Council on Dental Health in their evaluation of the dental health statements in school textbooks!), that many ancient myths still are believed and some new ones actually are being made. Some of these new ones appear to us on the Council on Dental Health as more detrimental to human welfare than the old ancient myths that are a half or a quarter believed. And I should like to pursue this thought just a moment further. Myths flourish by repetition and the tradition of authority. I can point out a statement in one dental textbook which quoted an in its first edition and repeated him for five successive editions. The statement of the authority had been killed abruptly by a piece of laboratory research some years before the printing of the original textbook, the very first edition. I told an unappreciative representative of a book-publishing company recently, when he annoyed me about writing a book, that textbooks make excellent mausoleums for burying dead knowledge and that I hoped the purchasers merely bought textbooks to fill up empty shelves and that it was a shame to disturb dead things because so many of them smell vilely. And I think that many of you may have had the same discouraging experience as have I; you have scanned a new text and found statements that were already out of date by the time it was published. Now, right here I think that I should pause, perhaps, and offer my apologies to any of you brave ladies and any of you courageous men in this auditorium who ever have written a textbook. In passing, it may be worth while to note that myths also flourish by the coercive control of learned societies and distinguished groups. Then myths die hard, because it is difficult for scientific fact and common sense to demonstrate the myths' absurdity and harmfulness. They seldom die a real decent death when pompous individuals will to believee rather than to conclude. Any scientific hypothesis should survive when verified by fact and any unscientific hypothesis should die a clean-cut and final death when found invalid. It is hard to envision a true scientist who would try to preserve a poorly conceived hypothesis by burning people at a stake, putting them in concentration camps or even branding them as un-American. The true scientist forgets his preliminary reports and his once intriguing hypothesis and goes to work on