ORAL INFECTIONS AND THEIR RELATION TO DISEASES OF THE EYE

Abstract

My remarks must of necessity be chiefly clinical in character, as it seems almost impossible these days to be a clinician and a research worker at the same time. For many years, I have been calling the oral cavity the dirtiest cavity in the body, and have claimed that the maxillary bones and the mandible become infected more often than any bones in the body. The aforementioned statement caused little or no comment until last year, when it was challenged by Dr. Anthony Bassler, who took me to task at a dental meeting in Connecticut, and in his scholarly way called my attention to the fact that the intestines were much more unclean, and that they contained about 260 different kinds of bugs, and he called them all by their proper names. Of course, I felt disappointed because I knew at the time that in the mouth, there were only