I’m deep into what we dentists call a crown preparation. The subject tooth is the upper left second molar, aka tooth number 15. The patient is a kind fellow I have treated for twenty years. The precision the work demands is challenging, of course; the mouth is not an ideal place to work, after all. It’s a dark, sometimes bloody, wet hole connected to an often-jittery human.
I’m thankful for the additional light in the form of fiber optics in my hand piece, or “drill,” and for the computer-designed micro rotary cutting instruments fitted to it. Like most dentists these days I utilize state-of-the-art equipment. Like I tell my patients, “I need all the help I can get.”
To achieve excellent – or even just satisfactory – results it’s necessary to painstakingly attend to a myriad of tiny details. Sheesh, how did I get into this? Well, for one thing it’s in my blood; my granddad was a dentist.
I never knew my paternal grandfather.. He was in fact old enough to be my great grandfather and he died four years before I was born, from a heart attack while treating a patient. I don’t think the patient caused it but you never know. My Granddad obviously loved his work, so you could aptly apply the cliche “he died doing what he loved.”
He had come to The Magic City to start his practice in 1908, shortly after graduating from the dental school of the University of Maryland in Baltimore. He had grown up on a farm in Middlesex County on the Chesapeake Bay, and become enamored with the idea of being a dentist from observing the traveling tooth doctor who would visit the local farms regularly to perform dental extractions and such.
I think he thought it looked like an easy and interesting way to make a living compared to farming, so as soon as he maxed out on the local county schooling, he boarded a steamboat at the public wharf and was off to Baltimore. After his time in the big city studying the art and science of dentistry, my granddad held no great desire to return to what he considered his backward and dull home place, instead choosing to settle in booming and exotic Roanoke, then a world away.
He arrived by horse and buggy as a single man with the world at his fingertips, confident that Roanokers – among them railroad workers, church goers, shop keepers, saloon and brothel patrons – would provide him with a steady stream of customers. And he was right.
In the early years of my own dental practice I would frequently tend to patients who had been treated by my granddad, and I was lucky to observe the fine gold work he had placed in their mouths in the form of crowns and bridges, inlays and onlays.
Peering at that gold work, which is of course mostly hidden from view in the day-to-day shuffle, I felt privy to something special: my granddad speaking to me through the years through his handiwork, communicating what he did and the excellence that he achieved.
What my granddad’s dental work did not convey to me, however, was how he did it, other than with great care, skill, and love. My granddad did the amazing gold work that I observed in these old patients – who are mostly gone now – with none of the new-fangled dental equipment that I rely so heavily upon.
And on top of that they tell me that he was a big man with huge hands, who nevertheless performed such precise work. Hmmm… just call me amazed. And inspired.
A few years ago I was talking to a patient of mine about the dentist granddad that I never knew, and I mentioned that he wore a bow tie every day of his working life. The following day this same patient showed up with a Kroger bag full of bow ties. “I don’t need these anymore. Learn to tie them and wear them…it’s kind of a neat connection with your granddad.” I did, I do, and it is.
We all have relatives who died not long before we were born, folks who we long to have known. Happily, I’ve discovered that one can really get a good sense of who they were in many ways, probably most of all just by listening to the lingering whisper of their presence. And observing the work they left behind.
Even dental work – done with fairly crude equipment, huge hands and a caring mind.
– Johnny Robinson
