THE story of the development of surgery and dentistry has its origins in the earliest wall drawings of the pre-Christian era and the more deeply one delves into the historical association of these 2 professions, the more one is impressed by the impact of war on their separation and development. Paradoxically, war has also acted as the catalyst to initiate co-operation and progress in both. Dentistry emerged as a profession late in the 18th century and subsequently Fauchard and Nasmyth in Europe, Kingsley and Gunning in the United States founded a special branch devoted to the care of the jaws. When Europe was plunged into conflict in 1914, the sound basis for the treatment of jaw fractures laid down by those pioneers was built on by such giants as Kelsey Fry, Blair, Ivy and Kazanjian and the framework of oral surgery was established. The origins of plastic surgery are less recent but in spite of the h fashionable surgery was ablational surgery Indeed the first man to try to restore the facial defects of the war wounded was the director of the Slade School of Art, Professor Henry Tonks who made for them external prostheses of painted silver. The story of Queen Mary’s Hospital at Sidcup has recently been retold (Bingham and Moore, 1976) and it was here that plastic surgery was finally established as a fulltime specialty by such men as Gillies and Kilner of Britain, Blair and Ivy of the USA, and Pickerill of New Zealand. The closeness of the two disciplines at this time is illustrated by Blair and Ivy being major contributors to both. Blair was a general surgeon from St Louis who had written a book on the surgery of the face and jaws and Ivy was a practising surgeon with a dental qualification. Both became full-time plastic surgeons. Between the wars both plastic and oral surgery made slow but steady progress; facial injuries were few but the principles of plastic surgical repair and reconstruction were extended to other branches of surgery that had suffered from neglect such as burns, hand injuries, and congenital malformations. The tissues of the mouth and jaws on the other hand have a wide variety of disorders and disease and in the interval between the wars, many which had previously been treated by the medical profession became recognised as belonging to areas of endeavour covered by dentistry in general, and oral surgery in particular. The development of dental schools in the universities between the world wars firmly established the autonomy of the dental profession. These schools evolved a service in prostheses, in the broadest sense of the term, that was unique. In no other branch of the healing arts had knowledge of substitutes for tissues lost through disease and trauma progressed and been applied with such skill and perfection. Dentistry was