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Theme 11
OUTSTANDING DENTISTS
With the demise of the Western Roman Empire about the year
475 AD (Christian Era), medicine in Europe declined into a torpor.
Monasteries became the only places where medicine or surgery was
still practiced. The only people who had any rudimentary knowledge
of surgery were the barbers. They helped monks in their surgical
ministrations. They stepped into the breach, calling themselves barber-
surgeons. They practiced simple dentistry, including tooth extractions
and cleaning of teeth. In the 1600s a number of barber-surgeons
restricted their activity and dropped the word “barber,” simply calling
themselves surgeons. By the early 1700s, dentistry was considered a
lesser part of medicine. By the end of the 18th century, it began to
emerge as an independent discipline. In the late 1750s the term
“dentist”, borrowed from the French, started to be used in Britain to
describe tooth operators. The 20th century saw an explosion of new
materials, techniques and technology in dentistry thanks to great
scientists.
Implantology did not start yesterday. We can trace the origin of
mini implants in Europe with the work of Dr. Chercheve in 1963.
Chercheve, in his efforts to improve on earlier spiral designs,
proposed several theories on the relationship of the metallic endosteal
implant to its osseous environment. After that, it seemed that the use
of mini- implants was limited to temporary situations as a stabilizer
and support for prosthesis. Due to their short-term success, some
dentists decided to test their limits by manufacturing implants with the
same material as the standard implant and start using them for longer-
term anchorage. However, their use spread slowly to stabilization of
partials and in some cases, fixed teeth.
Dr. Leonard I. Linkow graduated from NewYork College of
Dentistry in 1952 and soon after began pioneering the modern field of
implant dentistry. He developed and introduced to the profession
many different implant systems and transformed them into elegant and
practical realities. Dr. Linkow placed his first complete unilateral
subperiosteal implant to support a posterior unilateral fixed
restoration, soon after his graduation from dental school. He published
his first article about implantology in Dental Digest Magazine in