On the Dentist Chair

Time for a casual tale. I just came from the dentist, and up to now I can officially consider myself an experienced patient with these people. Normally you wouldn't think about this, and drop the memory once you are out, but the difference between how they proceed here in New York from home has kept me wondering.

Today I was received by an Indian woman, who had the particular feat of being butterfingered. And as a native from India, she also had this way of speaking that makes all Indians have the most hilarious accent of the English language. But she was really sweet, I give her that. Every once in a while (every 30 seconds or so) she would keep asking "are you okay?", non stop till the end of the one hour consultation. She would even give me a summary of all the possible courses of action and ask me what I would like to do first, which is a very curious question because I had no idea what she was talking about. Then something happened twice that as far as I remember never happened to me back home: she would call a supervisor, like a senior dentist, in order to check her work on me. The old man was a Chinese (naturally). I mean, he could be from Japan or Vietnam, but for the sake of convenience let us assume he was a Han from Taiwan. In all my dentist consultations here, this senior dentist would come, take a second look and give the seal of approval. I thought maybe because they are students, but I'm not so sure. They don't look THAT young.

All this seems common ground. But it occurred to me to assume the position of the patient as a vantage point, and not simply dismiss it as an uncomfortable experience. Here you are, lying on this burdensome couch (if it can benignly be called a couch), with your mouth open, and some unknown person sticking metallic objects into your mouth for an hour or more. In the case of the sweet Indian woman, her clumsy style made water spill all over my face all over again. But the truth is that we are in a highly vulnerable position here! If the mafia is looking to kill you, definitively doing it at the dentist chair would be the way to go!! With all this piercing objects, miniature drills and plastic cables there are many options that can come to my mind, and it wouldn't even take a minute. But then the sweet Indian woman with her insistent and comically pronounced "are you okay?" couldn't have been a hitman. We haven't got to that level yet.

Then the supervisor would come in, take a look, and then they would start a discussion of whatever was going on (in both their not-so-unusual-anymore accents). Surrounded by all this objects and technology, with lights aiming at your face like if you were in an interrogation room, these doctors over you speaking this unintelligible language with all its codes and meanings, you start to realize that you are in a laboratory, and you are the subject of investigation. The difference is that they don't ask a rat for permission to do anything with it, and the rat cannot sue for malpractice (and, of course, the rat doesn't get charged). But the truth is that you are being investigated, inspected, studied; and technology is being applied to you, knowledge is being used over you, methods are being tested and practiced through you. No one likes to be subject of scientific experimentation, but this is what we do for the sake of health; and a very important aspect of health with sensible aesthetical repercussion: our teeth. A woman can live proudly with small breasts. But can we proudly live without teeth?

And this brings me to my conclusion. I have, what I think, is a very plausible hypotheses. The reason why we start seeing people smiling with their teeth out in the open, that we trace as far back as middle 20th century, and not before, it's because of the invention of dentistry. Let's be serious, I don't remember any important picture, painting or sculpture of any important or unimportant person portraying an open smile. And I don't think it would be because of Benedictine bias against laughing. Make the test, google for the pictures of all the famous people previous to middle 20th century. No one is showing their teeth. Was it because those were less happy times then? I don't think so. The most reasonable answer is because they had no teeth.

Picture Immanuel Kant, in all his wisdom, without teeth in his mouth. Why would he smile for the painter? How about Mary Antoinette who must have lost some teeth before losing her head? We can bear Julius Caesar's baldness, but we don't like to imagine him conquering Gaul with a black whole on his front denture. That would make him look like a redneck. Queen Victoria, Empress of the Universe, or Elizabeth I Queen of heretic England, not so charming anymore. Maybe Wagner was not so ireful as he looks in his picture, but was simply hiding his lack of teeth, so as everyone else. And maybe an enlightened mind like Nietzsche discovered the all too obvious solution of letting his mustache grow insanely, and now he wouldn't look so insane himself but a practical man hiding his horrid denture.

Anyways, we have something to thank to dentistry, and not only avoiding the hellish toothache. Today we are compensating for all the millenia of humans representations without open smiles by exploiting our current photograph technology like if there were no tomorrow; a compliment for progress.