Our family dentist, Dr. Handelman, was a burly fellow with movie star looks and thick fingers that didn’t easily fit inside a child’s mouth. The movie star looks were possibly what had clinched my mother’s decision in choosing the man—I often wondered if she chose him from a lineup—but he caused so much pain to her children that even in the waiting room she could hear our muffled cries of distress.
These were the days when teeth, children’s teeth in particular, seemed to be made of cavities. There was novocaine, of course, delivered to the gum near the offending tooth. It arrived by way of a terrifying needle, and though it did the job it was meant to do, the presence of the needle in the tray beside the dentist chair was enough to make my heart race. All numbed up with nothing to feel, the next affliction was the drill. Oh, the drill! It whined like a cross between a mosquito and a table saw. It rattled up inside my head and every bone in my body chattered uncontrollably.
What followed the drill was a quiet period, a pause in the war while the dentist went off and mixed some gummy filler for the crater he had just created in my mouth. Like a builder of sloppy stone walls, he jammed as much filler as possible into the new hole in my tooth. It was squeaky stuff, I remember, and only later did we all understand it was a magic potion made of quicksilver, a fairy tale name for liquid mercury.
It was over then. The only thing left was to accept the lollipop offered by the receptionist while trying to keep from drooling or biting my numb tongue. That lollipop and others like it kept us in cavities, and in time the whole procedure started again.
Many famous men have done a lot of thinking about teeth. Toothache in particular seems to occupy their thoughts, possibly because it’s painful and at the time in which they thought and wrote about it, it wasn’t easy to cure. The Bard himself, in Much Ado About Nothing, reminds us: “For there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently.” And the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once reflected: “The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.” Little could be done to relieve the pain of a toothache except to relieve the mouth of its tooth. Clove oil was prescribed, and crushed garlic. An amulet of garlic or obsidian around the neck couldn’t hurt, though neither was specific to toothache. A pair of pliers, a shot of spirits—those were the time-tested tools of the dentists of old.
Most of our mouths have, or used to have, thirty-two permanent teeth. Four of these are third molars, or what we call wisdom teeth, which suited our ancestors well with their diet of coarse foods. But now that we are more sippers and slurpers than grinders, our third molars are not as necessary to our survival, and especially as the human jaw gets smaller, our wisdom teeth often grow out sideways or not at all and get stuck under the gum. People of Asian or Native American descent are more likely than people of European ancestry to be missing at least one wisdom tooth. Their jaws are smaller perhaps? Their adaptation has been quicker?
As for dogs, while they surpass us in permanent teeth at forty-two, they are free from this particular vicissitude of evolution and have no wisdom teeth at all.
Confucius, given his ancestry, was more likely than me to have fewer than four wisdom teeth, but he demonstrates that wisdom teeth are not in any way tied to wisdom, for he had a mouthful of it. He joins Shakespeare and Shaw in his preoccupation with our pearly whites: “Behind every smile there’s teeth.” Short, simple, true.
My mother was more concerned with our teeth than our smile. She was not a careless woman. She was not going to allow our teeth and gums to fall to the dogs, as they say. Orthodonture could wait, our crooked incisors, our over- and underbites. But the teeth themselves were another story. Young teeth were salvageable. A problem could be addressed, a cavity filled while we were still children.
So began her search for another dentist. It was not long before she came upon just the man she was looking for, a man so unlike Dr. Handelman we wondered if he actually was a dentist, if the word “dentist” really included someone in the category of Dr. Ernst. Dr. Ernst, or Painless as he quickly and fondly came to be known in our family, was a small, slight man with a perennial dusting of dandruff visible even on the white collar of his white dentist coat, yet scarcely a hair on his head. He had the unfortunate breath that comes with a stomach ulcer, but for the sake of his patients he chewed gum vigorously to cover that imperfection. This was the kind of man he was, thinking always of his patients. He talked neither too much nor too little, and even though he didn’t seem completely comfortable with children or teenagers, he warmed to us over time and I couldn’t help but think we improved his life by demonstrating that kids were mostly tolerable.
Painless was an excellent practitioner in all ways, but especially in the area of pain. During every procedure, whether a simple look inside the mouth or a cavity to attend to, he would ask and repeat at roughly three-minute intervals the question: “Am I hurting you?” If the answer was yes he’d administer something to numb. No terrifying needle. It felt like a pinprick. But mostly the answer was no, Painless, you are not hurting me and I now believe you will never hurt me and it makes me a happy patient and a grateful human being.
Painless taught me something else in our few years together. He wasn’t a man who spoke in imperatives but the one request he gave when necessary was: “Open widely!” Open widely? I already loved grammar, and to hear my dentist employ an adverb where a lesser man would use an adjective—well, it was one more reason to sit comfortably in his chair.
