As a student I was very attracted to the fact that practitioners came and taught us in the Dental School. Later I came to see this as a disaster, because they were really teaching a trade-like approach rather than an educated, tertiary level-like approach. It was an interesting change. I really appreciated them early on, but then I came to quite dislike them in an academic sense.

We had people like Ray Begg who probably, as was mentioned earlier, provided a great influence nationally and internationally. It was wonderful for young students, but later I saw that his approach lacked a scientific basis.

Ann Westmore: Are we talking about a change from a trade approach to a scientific approach?

Jeremy Graham: I believe there’s room for two kinds of education. Certainly you have academics providing the scientific basis, without any doubt whatsoever. But dentists are also working in people’s mouths, taking out teeth, doing crowns and implants, and so on. The fact is that most people who leave dental training are treating the public. They need the practical education to do that. Yes, dentistry has a scientific basis, but we are also a trade, if you like. We need to know how to do things right, practically speaking, when we were let loose on patients. That’s where the private dentists came into it, advising us on how to do that.

Peter Reade: I think there’s a good example that dentists around the table will recognise - G.V. Black in America.[50] He laid down the ground rules for how you removed dental decay and prepared teeth to be filled. That became totally accepted dogma. And it was probably all wrong. But for seventy or eighty years from the 1890s it went unchallenged, with no scientific basis.

John Hales: I’d like to support Peter in that. My Professor of Conservative Dentistry was the late ‘Fluff’ Down,[51] much beloved by dentists throughout the state. As far as ‘Fluff’ was concerned, the authority was G.V. Black. We used to look at slides of monumental cavity extensions, a lot of “extension for prevention” went on.[52] As far as ‘Fluff was concerned that’s the way it should be done.

Peter Reade: I think the end of the story is that those principles destroyed more teeth than they preserved.

John Harcourt: Engineering principles would have told us straight away that what we were doing was wrong.

Garry Pearson: Perhaps this is a reflection on the values that the School is looking to have its graduates act from.

The Dental Association currently has, as one of its objectives, to continue to promote the art and the science of dentistry. I don’t think there’s necessarily any conflict between those two things. They should be able to come together, with current, authoritative science informing the art and the delivery of that service. It’s not a technical or trade activity. On the contrary, it’s high art, at its best.

Hopefully we don’t have to talk about a division, but rather a convergence, of those perspectives and a set of values that is consonant between what the School is after and what the profession delivers every day.

Peter Reade: I agree with the art business. I was really talking about thoughtless mechanics.

Owen Crombie: When I was a student, Professor Reade often said, ‘We’re not trying to train dentists, we’re trying to train scientists’. As a student at the time, you could see the point of it from one aspect. But, as Jeremy was saying, you had practitioners who were doing part-time lecturing or demonstrating who gave you very useful insights into what you were going to have to do next. Although a certain number of graduates became academics or researchers, a much greater number were thrown out into the wide world, providing the dentistry that the public got to see.

Things like Black’s principles, which may or may not have been very good, gave you the ability to do dental work quickly and effectively. And it wasn’t until a few years later that the question of whether it was the best way to do things emerged and you started to come to grips with the science. Then you asked, ‘I’m doing this because it works and it’s quick but what’s been written about this? Does it make sense?’

In my experience, the scientific part of the training didn’t have a chance to germinate until I actually conquered the mechanical aptitude aspects, because one is under a lot of pressure when you start out as a dentist to get the mechanical aspects right. People don’t much care whether the filling breaks provided you get it finished quickly and it doesn’t hurt.

Hector Orams: I don’t know if this is directly relevant, but what was taught in the Dental School was governed to some extent by the General Dental Council of Great Britain (GDC) because dentists who qualified had the privilege, if you like to call it that, of being registered in Great Britain. So they could move from Australia and practise there without having to do any other exams.

The GDC sent people every so often to visit Melbourne and see what was being taught and to get a sense of what time was being spent on this or that. If they weren’t satisfied they would have cancelled that right to practise in Britain. So that may have had some influence on what was taught.

John Harcourt: They were visits with a capital ‘V’.

Ann Westmore: How often did that happen?

John Harcourt: Every ten years, I think.

Peter Reade: I’d forgotten about that. They were real junkets for the UK fellows.

John Harcourt: The last one wasn’t, but the one before was [a junket].

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine