The World of Dentistry

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Version française

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The Bartlett pear (called Williams pear in England) is one of the tastiest and juiciest fruit in North American supermarkets. It’s hard to believe that by chewing on this soft delicacy, much to my dismay, I managed to break the filling on one of my lower molars.

Dental problems started to appear about 10,000 years ago, when humans stopped roaming the land to settle in villages and towns. At that time, mankind’s eating habits changed as our ancestors began eating more sugar, a leading cause for cavities.

Could it be that toothaches are God’s curse on the children of Cain for adopting their father’s sedentary living?

Cain was a farmer and his brother Abel was a nomad. Abel sacrificed the firstborns of his cattle to God who seemed to enjoy it. However, the zucchini, carrots and celery Cain offered up weren’t to the Almighty’s taste, maybe because Cain neglected to serve them with ranch dressing.

It took a long time for people to understand tooth decay. In olden times, cavities were thought to be caused by worms. In ancient Egypt, dental malformation in children was treated by feeding skinned and cooked mice to toddlers. In China, cavities were filled with bat dung. In Spain, frequent mouthwash with urine was key to good oral hygiene.

In the Middle Ages, tooth pullers began exercising their trade in public squares, promising their clients painless relief. Of course they were lying through their teeth but it provided great entertainment for crowds who had neither TV nor Internet to kill time. Tooth pullers also removed calluses.

In those days, dentistry and pedicure drank at the same well.

When Renaissance arrived, hairdressers joined the dental trade bandwagon. Noble ladies of Florence could thus have tartar removed from their teeth while getting a perm or having their hair styled.

In the 18th century, Pierre Fauchard, the “father of modern dentistry,” published The Surgeon Dentist in which he recommended the use of heavy metals for tooth fillings. He also endorsed regular mouthwash with urine.

A man collected his own urine in a bottle to use as mouthwash. Beware of unproven personal hygiene advice: it might just be a fad... especially if it’s gross.

Progress cannot be stopped but it sometimes takes a while to occur.

You can understand why I have always had mixed impressions about dental medicine. Should it be considered a science? An art? A technical trade?

With this in mind I began looking for a dentist. I chose a new dental office that had just opened in a strip mall close to where I lived, tucked between a video rental store, a pizza parlor and a realtor’s office.

Doctor Nguyen’s office was new, tidy, tastefully decorated and equipped with the latest technology. The good doctor was a pretty 30 year-old woman who had recently graduated from a Las Vegas dental school, a city that does not readily come to mind when you seek higher education.

I was told however that its dental schools have an excellent reputation.

After her examination, Doctor Nguyen told me that my decayed molar needed a crown but first I had to see a dental surgeon who would lower my gum, raise my jaw and perform root canal surgery. She would make the necessary arrangements for me.

Root canal surgery is a procedure in which the pulp of a damaged tooth is removed with files, reamers, drills and other precision instruments. Although this treatment sounds painful, the Polish surgeon I went to see possessed undeniable skills.

He first gave me a solid local anesthetic and then put on a blaring Johnny Cash CD to distract me from the abominations he was performing in my mouth using sharp objects.

I did not feel a thing.

When I saw Doctor Nguyen again, she worked for several minutes on my molar before saying: “This won’t do.”

She led me to her office. My mouth was numb from the anesthetic and I was still wearing the necessary bib that dentists tie around the neck of their patients while they intervene.

Doctor Nguyen turned on a giant screen on which I could see the digitized x-ray image of my mouth.

“You see, I can’t install a crown because your teeth are out of alignment, specifically here, here and here as well as on all this side of your mouth,” she said pointing at teeth with her laser pen.

“This is what I suggest: I will make a set of braces to adjust your teeth. You will wear it in your mouth for six to twelve months, long enough for your teeth to be redressed. This treatment will cost about $1,800. Your parents would have done well to take you to a dentist when you were a child.”

I refrained from telling her about my grandfather who lived the last 30 years of his life with only three teeth in his mouth and who saw a blacksmith when he had a toothache.

“Then I will install crowns on the teeth of your lower jaw which will no longer be aligned with those of the upper jaw. It’s about twelve crowns and it will cost $15,000 to $18,000. We can start the treatment next week.”

I asked Doctor Nguyen for a few days to think about it.

“You know, many people would not hesitate one moment to mortgage their house to receive such a treatment,” she said.

“Oh! I believe you!” I replied. “However, just to satisfy my curiosity, how much would it cost to have all my teeth pulled out to replace them with dentures?”

“About $10,000 but I wouldn’t recommend it,” she answered.

I thanked her, paid for the treatment I already had received and left her office, dizzy from novocaine and the astronomical amounts that she had quoted me for fixing my teeth.

A friend suggested I seek a second opinion and recommended a Swedish dentist for whom her sister worked as a dental assistant.

So I went to see Doctor Svensson, a middle-aged lady who looked in my mouth mumbling “I see, I see...”

Then she asked me:

“Is your dentist young? Her office and equipment, are they all computerized?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

“Dear sir, I think I can fit you with a crown. Would you prefer gold or porcelain? I believe a gold crown would look good on you. A gold crown costs $900, a porcelain crown, $1,200.”

“Gold would be nice,” I replied sheepishly promising myself to light a candle to Saint John Maynard Keynes who suggested the gold standard be replaced with the porcelain standard at the Bretton-Woods Conference in 1944.

John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who played a key role in the signing of the Bretton Woods Agreement in New Hampshire. As a result of this agreement, the gold standard was dropped. The porcelain standard is my invention. If you exchange your money for porcelain, you will be disappointed.

Two weeks later I was proudly wearing my new gold crown. It felt good and I was relieved that I did not have to rinse my mouth with urine.

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The Encyclopædia

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I was home one evening in 1986 getting ready for a writing session when the doorbell rang. Suzanne Vega was singing Marlene on the Wall on the stereo and I turned it down before opening the door to a 50-year old stranger standing awkwardly in front of me in a jacket and a tie.

He was selling the Encyclopædia Britannica.

It was not clear to me how he knew that I was a budding editor but he was quick to point out that a young man of my profession needed reliable reference material.

The 15th edition of Britannica had been published a year earlier and with 33 volumes it boasted that it held “the sum of all human knowledge.”

Those were the days before the World Wide Web and Google. Searching for information meant spending hours in a library instead of simply firing up a browser.

I did have a computer back then, an Apple Macintosh Plus, which was sneered at by my colleagues who considered it just a toy. They all used Micom 2000 word processors to write.

The Apple Macintosh Plus micro-computer made a significant contribution to bringing computing to the masses, as long as they could afford the over $2,500 purchase price. Public domain photo provided by Apple Wiki.

Listening to the salesman I could not help but be seduced by the opportunity to have a vast amount of general information at my disposal in the comfort of my home. However the steep $1,800 price frightened me. I am not the kind of man to make a major purchase on impulse.

I told the salesman I would think about it and call him to let him know of my decision. He gave me his card and left disappointed. I then went back to writing my story regarding the structure of the new National Gallery of Canada which was under construction. To me it looked like the skeleton of a dinosaur.

From a distance and with some imagination the granite pillars of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa can look like the ribcage of a dinosaur's skeleton. The glass walls demonstrate that it is easier to achieve transparency in architecture than in politics.

The next day at work I told my friend Aaron about the surprise visit from the encyclopædia salesman and that I was hesitant to disburse such a large amount of money.

“You should buy it,” said Aaron. “Knowledge is priceless. Did you know that if you read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica the University of Oxford will give you a degree?”

“Is that true?”

“Of course it is, don’t you know anything? The Encyclopædia Britannica is a British institution! Frankly, I don’t know why I waste my time discussing with a peasant like you who does not understand the value of learning!”

Aaron’s argument made an impression on me and I decided to invest in perfecting my knowledge.

Of course, I know now that nobody ever received a free university degree by reading a complete encyclopædia.

I also learned that Encyclopædia Britannica is actually a Scottish institution (established in Edinburgh in the 18th century) and that by the mid-1980s it had been owned by American interests for over 60 years.

When I called back, the encyclopædia salesman was shocked that I had kept my word. I told him that, yes, I was ready for enlightenment and that I would buy the leather-bound gilt-edged onionskin edition.

At its peak, Encylopædia Britannica employed up to 2,300 door-to-door salesmen among which Empire of the Sun author J. G. Ballard and actor Woody Harrelson's father.

For years my encyclopædia sat proudly in one of my bookcases and although I did not read it from beginning to end, it gave me hours of intellectual satisfaction.

When my wife and I divorced in 2000, we sold the house and I prepared to move to a small apartment. Looking at all my belongings, I knew I needed to get rid of many of the things I had acquired over the years.

But before I moved, a friend came to visit from out of town and stayed at the house for a few days. To thank me for my hospitality, she gave me the Encyclopædia Britannica on CD-ROM, a $50 value. I thought this electronic version would be adequate for my newly restricted living quarters.

I packed my leather-bound encyclopædia and took it to a used bookstore where I was offered $25 for the complete set of 33 volumes. I felt insulted by this contempt of knowledge.

When I calmed down, I decided to entrust my literary treasure to a small library I knew in the countryside, close to the haunted house I once owned.

I drove there only to be turned down by the librarian who claimed she did not have the shelf space. I then offered it to a literacy organization which also rejected the donation.

I regretfully realized that my initial $1,800 investment in knowledge was actually worthless.

And then it struck me: I had been totally mistaken about this prized possession of mine. An encyclopædia is not knowledge, it’s merely information. Information becomes knowledge only once it’s processed. How many people have owned encyclopædias without ever reading them?

Now that the Discovery Channel was available for all to watch, my beautifully-bound encyclopaedia, was perceived as not only cumbersome but useless.

A week later, I was visiting my old friend Asaph Mikhailovich, a well-read man cursed with a crippling affliction. I told him how I had been trying to dispose of my encyclopædia. He quietly looked at me and said:

– You know, when I want to consult Britannica, I have to ride my wheelchair ten blocks to the public library.

Not anymore.

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Working for the Russians

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Version française

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Lately Russian bots have been crawling my blogs. This reminds me of my early days as a professional writer and editor.

In the early 1980s, while Canada was in the midst of a recession, I reluctantly joined the ranks of the unemployed. With the jobless rate in the double-digits I decided it would be a good time to get an education, hoping that when I graduated there would be more work opportunities.

University was costly for me. Of course, tuition fees were expensive and the menial labour I had to do to support myself left me living in poor lodgings and eating cheap food. I was broke and indebted.

After completing my university degree I naively thought the days of despicable jobs were over. I was educated, I had paid my dues, I assumed it was time to reap the benefits.

I soon realized that employers were not easily impressed with my diploma: they wanted candidates with a degree AND experience.

With Canada slowly recovering from recession and nobody willing to hire me, I turned to freelance work.

The first job I found was writing essays for students who lacked the discipline to attend their classes but did not want to break their parents’ heart by flunking their courses.

With the name of their professor, the subject of the essay, and the bibliography and syllabus of the course, in two days I could whip out a decent 15-page paper for nearly any of the liberal arts.

First I would go to the university library to dig up the professor’s doctorate thesis to get a feel for his character, beliefs and writing style. All the while noting any of his ideas that I might be able to recycle to flatter his ego.

University libraries usually carry the doctorate thesis of all their faculty. That's where you will find what your professor sounded like when he or she was sitting on the other side of the lectern.

Then, I would read the introduction and conclusion of all the books in the bibliography connected to the subject of the essay I was to write, skimming through the content and taking notes in the process.

The speed-reading course I had taken one summer became a sound investment.

Then I would write for fifteen hours straight, peppering the document with any bit of general knowledge I had that seemed appropriate.

Without having attended any of those classes, I never got less than a “B” grade and my satisfied customers started referring me to their slacker friends.

Unfortunately, this kind of hack writing is only profitable around mid-term and at the end of a semester.

One evening as I was waiting for a customer in a university coffee shop, I met an adult student who was taking Russian-language classes and worked as a writer for the Soviet embassy press office. We became friends and after meeting a few times, she asked me if I would be interested in a position with her employer.

Starting to work in a potential Russian spy nest was somewhat frightening since the Cold War was still raging. However I had a powerful incentive for wanting that job: my landlord came straight out of a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel and cared about the working class only if they paid their rent on time.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a 19th century Russian writer known for his lengthy novels, dependence to alcohol and poor gambling skills. Hate him or love him, he is considered as one of Europe's major writers and certainly his works should be part of anybody's general knowledge.

The interview I had with the press secretary went well and he offered me a part-time job as an editor. The Soviet embassy press office was located in two contiguous apartments on the 15th floor of a large residential building. Office furniture consisted mainly of ordinary chairs and tables crumbling under piles of papers and publications. The table that was assigned to me faced a bay window which gave me a splendid view of the city.

My job was to rework stories originally written in Moscow and render them printable for Canadian publications.

I do not know if this is still valid, but since time immemorial Russian writers had been paid by the page: the longer the text, the more money they would get.

Once you know that, War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov start making sense.

The stories I was to edit were translated from Russian to either French or English. Regrettably, translators were also paid by the page and already long bland articles were getting stretched further in the process. I quickly became quite adept at turning a 4,000-word piece of logorrhea into a 300-word somewhat adequate news story.

I say “somewhat adequate” because the subject matter of the texts I received was often a hard sell. Canadian papers did not care much about the Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth) nor about the use of pesticides to boost agricultural reform in Turkmenistan, one of the Soviet republics.

From time to time however interesting stories would appear. Papers about the Soviet space program, medical research, natural wonders such as Lake Baïkal and so forth could be respun and placed in Canadian media.

Months passed and one day, looking through my window, I noticed building cranes had appeared in the skyline. Construction was picking up, a sure sign that the economy was getting back on track.

The construction sector is considered as a barometer of the economy. Commercial and residential building projects create wealth through job creation, accommodation for new or expanding businesses and lodgings for new homeowners.

One morning, 18 months after I began working for the Russians, the press secretary called me for a meeting and told me how satisfied he was with my work. However decisions had been made higher up to modernize. They were going to replace the typewriters everybody was using with computers. This meant efficiencies had to be gained elsewhere. That was the first time I heard that euphemism meaning I was being laid off.

But in that year and a half, my freelance worker status had improved and I was no longer writing essays for students. The experience I had gained was valuable and some of my clients, learning I was available, started providing me with more work.

I had gotten myself a career.

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