Sesquicentennial review: the making of a profession.

I shook my head on many occasions as I contemplated the changes in dentistry that have occurred over the past 150 years that I would discuss in this article, often thinking to myself, "How could the early dentists have possibly practiced dentistry every day under those circumstances and with those tools?" It made my own clinical career seem pretty easy but engendered in me great admiration for my predecessors and our profession.