I am currently reading the book
The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith. It is 4th in The Isabel Dalhousie Series. (A.M. Smith is also the author of the popular series The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.) Anyway, I was reading along and came to a part I found interesting and funny so I shared it with Jacob and I wanted other dentist enthusiasts to read it as well. (don't worry, it's only a couple of pages long...) All you really need to know about this scene is that Isabel, the main character, is a philosopher and Grace is her housekeeper who has just had an appointment with her dentist for a root canal. Also, the book is set in Edinburg, Scotland.
excerpt from Ch. 8
"Don't talk to me about it," said Grace the next morning. "Just don't talk to me about it!"
Isabel was on the point of agreeing. She did not wish to discuss dentists and would be quite happy not to go into the details of Grace's dental trauma of the previous day. But then she realised that although Grace said that she did not want to discuss the matter, that is exactly what she intended to do.
"Yes," said Grace, removing the headscarf she had worn of the journey to work. "The least said about yesterday the better."
Isabel looked up from
The Scotsman crossword. She had been constructing her own clue. Three words: four, five, and nine letters.
A plant's base beside a waterway precedes intervention. Root canal treatment.
"Uncomfortable?"
"Extremely," said Grace. "He tried to persuade me to have one of those injections, but I said no. He told me that it would be very painful, but I stuck to my guns. I can't stand that stuff, that..."
"Novacaine," said Isabel. How might one express that in a crossword?
Sounds like a new rod with which to beat another until numb? Not a very good clue, but it would have to do.
"Yes, that stuff," said Grace. "I can't bear it, you know. That awful feeling of being all puffed up, as if somebody had just hit you in the jaw. No thank you!"
"But if you don't--"
Grace cut Isabel off. "I can take pain. I've never been one to dodge that. But this was really, really sore. He had to guddle about inside the tooth and it felt as if somebody was putting an electric wire down there. It was terrible."
They were both silent for a moment, Grace remembering the pain, Isabel thinking about how much pain there was, that life itself floated in a vast sea of pain, numbed here and there for brief moments, but coming back in great waves.
"You see what he had to do," Grace went on, "was to take out the nerve from the root of the tooth. Can you imagine that? I kept thinking of it as a long piece of elastic being dragged out of me. Do you remember knicker elastic? Like that."
"I don't think nerves are like that," said Isabel. "I don't think that you can actually see them. They don't look like elastic, or wires for that matter."
Grace stared at her. "Well, what do they look like?" she asked.
"I think they must be tissue of some sort," said Isabel. "A bit like..."
She shrugged. She had never seen a nerve.
"Well, whatever it looked like," said Grace, "I felt it all right. But now. . .nothing! I can chew on that side and I feel nothing."
"They are a very great boon to mankind, dentists," said Isabel. "And I'm not sure that we are grateful enough to them. I'm not sure that we even bother to thank them." She paused. Were there any
statues of dentists? She thought not. And yet there should be. We had so many statues of generals and politicians and the like, who made wars and took life, and none of dentists, who battled pain. It was all wrong.
And yet, would anybody be able to take a statue of a dentist seriously? What if one were to go into some small town somewhere and find a bronze equestrian statue of a great dentist? Would one be able to do anything but laugh? Of course there was St. Apollania, the patron saint of toothache, and she had read somewhere that the British Dental Association had a small statue of her in their headquarters.
"Why are you smiling?" asked Grace.
"Just thinking of something odd. It suddenly occurred to me that there are no statues of dentists---anywhere in Scotland, as far as I know. Maybe they have them elsewhere---I don't know. But it does seem rather unfair, don't you think?"
"Very," said Grace. . . .
Well, congratulations to anyone still reading this! I told Jacob we would just have to make a statue of him for our front yard. lol. If you've never read anything by A.M. Smith, this is my favorite series by him. Sometimes my eyes glaze over when Isabel goes off on her philosophical tangents, but overall, they are enjoyable books that also make you think. I would love to hear what everyone else has read lately. I really miss our Meadowbrook book club!
Thank you Shaela! I {lOvE} it!! :)
