[On the history of domestic dentistry: professor Gilyariy Ivanovich Vilga and his attempts to reform dental education].

One of the most prominent Russian odontologists of the early twentieth century, privat-docent of the Imperial Moscow University Gilyariy Ivanovich Vilga was engaged in the problem of dental education reforming all his life. Considering dentistry, a branch of medical science, equal to its other branches, he considered the optimal model of higher dental education in institutes with a four-year course of study. As the chairman of the Moscow Dentistry Society and the chairman of the board of the Russian Union of Dentists, he presented this initiative to the commission of the State Duma in 1914, but the project was rejected; as a member of the Scientific Dentistry Commission, he attempted again to present his model of dental education in 1918, but the project was rejected by the board of the Dentistry subsection of the People's Commissariat of Health. After his emigration to Poland, Vilga G.I. was a member of the board of professors and one of the directors of the State Institute of Dentistry, established in Warsaw in 1920 (since 1933, the Academy of Dentistry). In Russia, independent stomatological institutes also appeared, but much later.