This lighthearted collection draws on cultural references in art, history, literature, politics, film, and music to create a whimsical portrait of the dental profession. Provocative as well as informative, the 57 essays in this collection range in subject from a look at why modern vampires have fangs to treatise’s on saliva and local anesthesia, and a study of music in the dental office. This book will appeal to anyone associated with dentistry and makes a perfect gift.

Sometime, somewhere, we are all dental patients. Think for a moment from that vantage point: what went through your mind the last time you sat in the dentist’s chair? Fenced in by cabinets and countertops, caught under the beam of that sharp bright light, and engulfed in the pungent scent of clove, what did you sense? You may have felt a spark of hope, or fear, or vulnerability. Perhaps you simply checked the dental appointment off your mental to-do list and accepted another of life’s routines. Whatever your reaction, dental visits have exerted a tremendous influence on culture. Dentistry, medicine’s first specialty, reaches deep into our collective consciousness, supplying powerful metaphors not only for pain, but for healing, power, and the rhythms of everyday living.

Teeth are a window into the body and the psyche, not just of the individual but of the larger society. For each patient, of course, it’s a window the dentist knows to keep an eye on. But the window can also be instructive; keeping an ear to the pane for eavesdropping on society’s conversations about teeth and dentistry—conversations couched in such narrative forms as stories, poems, novels, television programs, movies, photographs, paintings, drawings, and prints—reveals themes that are complex, entertaining, and enlightening.

In 1959, C.P. Snow published his worries about the mutual antagonism he discerned between the “Two Cultures,” science, and the arts and humanities. Today, even as dentistry increases its emphasis on aesthetic, artistically oriented philosophies, dentistry and the arts can still seem miles apart. The gap we perceive between left-brain precision and right-brain creativity was expressed in a New Yorker cartoon several years ago. Two mothers sit together at a dance studio, chatting as they watch a little girl on toe shoes pirouette across the floor. “If she doesn’t make it as a dancer,” the girl’s mother says to the other woman, “she’s going to be a dentist.”

Yet dentistry and the humanities represent not antithetical but parallel responses to human experience. “Art is as wordless as it is timeless,” writes Sherwin B. Nuland in the introduction to Medicine: The Art of Healing, “but in this it differs from medical science, which is ever a creature uniquely of and for its time and has always required a literal articulation to be understood. Perhaps those very differences explain why two such seemingly disparate manifestations of culture should so naturally complement each other.”

Note the similarities: artists and doctors both take on dual functions as participants in and detached observers of society. And while practicing dentistry and writing about it (especially nontechnically) may be divided into opposite hemispheres, they really aren’t so far apart either. “Writing is not heroic,” Garrison Keillor writes in Salon, “it is methodical, like dentistry or throwing the discus.” Any serious writer must produce at least three drafts of a composition, Anne Lamott explains in her book on writing, Bird by Bird. The first is the down draft: you get it down. The second is the up draft: you clean it up. The third is the dental draft: you go over it tooth by tooth and examine it in detail.

When you write about dentistry itself, the dental draft takes on deeper meaning. For one thing, it has been said that writers experience life twice—once in the doing, and once again in writing about it. Kurt Vonnegut says he writes to find out what he thinks. As a dentist, I write to find out what I do. Writing about how artists, and the public they represent, see dentistry helps me clarify my own processes, examine my decisions, make sense of events, and recapture the day. Reading and writing about the humanities of dentistry offers me the double reward of celebrating the profession and helping me interpret my own experiences as a dentist and a patient.

What’s more, dentistry is as much about people as procedures, and writing ties them together. Pundits warn that science without a soul is antisocial, while art without science and technology is feckless. Plus, in this deconstructed, dichotomized age in which every specialization could be called a culture, a cross-pollination of dentistry and the humanities helps prevent dentistry’s isolation. Medical education increasingly turns to the humanities to sensitize students to the nonscientific needs of patients. Norman Cousins writes, “Literature helps the medical student analogize the patient, to make connections between the experiences of the human race and the conditions of the individual, and to fit the individual into a world that is not as congenial as it ought to be for people who are more fragile than they ought to be.” Literature, along with other arts and history, adds depth to the dental profession as well, reinforcing the human qualities of—the inherent humanity in—what dentists do.

A third reason for writing down the links between dentistry and the arts is to examine the fuzzy edges of the dental profession’s identity. After a century of toothpaste advertisements, nearly everyone who picks up a toothbrush realizes that dentistry occupies a quietly pervasive place in Western consciousness. Dentistry’s place in health care, on the other hand, has historically been less clear-cut. Is dentistry medicine? In America dentists are not—as they are in some other countries—physicians. Yet dentistry is not a condensed competitor to medicine, as podiatry on some level might be; nor an adjunct to medicine, as is optometry with regard to ophthalmology; nor, unlike chiropractic, an alternative to medicine. Despite its reliance on biomedical principles and a close identification with and significant contributions to medicine, dentistry occupies a unique position among the healing arts: no other health care profession claims the mouth as its purview.

While the primary impetus for this book has been the pursuit of that intersection of my own professional and personal interests—a uniting of the two cultures—the decade-long project it became also has taken on the patina of crusade. If some quote or picture placed between these covers sparks a glimmer of recognition or connection, stirs a fresh thought, or prods a faint “hmmm,” I will be cheered. If some phrase can fade the dated, carnival stereotypes of dentistry as simple fodder for comedy and cruelty, if some concept can begin to extend a nonclinical interest in dentistry beyond the voyeuristic pleasures of schadenfreunde, I will breathe a sigh of satisfaction. If the reader comes away with any broader appreciation of dentistry’s cultural weight, I will count this volume a success.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says almost all books take 2 to 10 years to get written. My experience supports her estimate. From 1990 to 2000, I listened in on some of civilization’s dental colloquies, collecting literary references and cataloguing art. Along the way I strung my pearls together into a necklace of short essays exploring dentistry from the perspective of the humanities. Most of the articles first appeared, in a somewhat altered state, as a column, “The Art of Dentistry,” in the Journal of the Arizona Dental Association. Others debuted in such publications as the Journal of the American College of Dentists, Journal of the History of Dentistry, Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, and Journal of the California Dental Association.