As was the custom of the time, he studied dentistry with a practicing dentist, and then commenced practicing dentistry, settling in Warsaw, Illinois in Judd moved to St. Louis in , establishing a successful practice and becoming a founder of the Missouri State Dental Association and the Missouri Dental College. Judd served as the first dean of the Missouri Dental College History has dealt kindly by the arts and sciences by throwing around their infancy a veil of mystery.
It has taken from the hand of fable and tradition a few scattered elements of fancy and woven them into semblances of august, pleasing, or imposing realities.
The myths that have been appropriated by the legal historian, which describe the origin and growth of legal codes when individuals first formed themselves into clans, and these spread into tribes, and widened into nations, were sufficiently probable to accomplish the designs of the historic writer by clothing these earliest records with the pleasing garments of simplicity. The historian, so far as theological science is concerned, has no need of mythical personifications to gild the cradle of its infancy, for revelation has appropriated to itself the task of illuminating these prehistoric mysteries, and ushers in its origin with the most imposing solemnities.
Those who pride themselves upon the antiquity, of the art or science to which they, have dedicated their lives are apt to deceive themselves with the idea that to be antique is to be ennobled, and that antiquity and nobility are synonymous terms; but it is highly probable that a correct history of the origin of medical, legal, or theological investigations would disabuse their minds of so flattering an illusion. Its broad foundations were not laid in a single day, and a structure reared thereon sufficiently imposing to immortalize its founders and ennoble all of its succeeding votaries; but the profound darkness of the olden time has been broken in upon and dispersed little by little, a single ray of light first forcing its way through, the surrounding gloom, and, thus making way for another, and another, until these truths of science have become manifest through the struggling energies of ages.
Fortunately for professional men, the respectability of an art or science at this age of the world does not rest upon the mythic glories of their earlier days; for were this the case, a few rays of light thrown upon those dark pages of their history might yet drag them from their honored pedestals, and place them side by side with arts and callings, which though now less esteemed, can boast of as high an antiquity and a no more plebeian origin than their own.
