My Father the Dentist

My father was, as I have often told you, a dentist, that is, a doctor of dental surgery, DDS.  He had wanted to be the other kind of doctor, the medical doctor, MD, but it was the 1929 Depression and his family could not afford the fees.  Later he admired me when I became a doctor, the really different kind, the PhD.  But all that is another story or maybe two.  Now I want to tell you about some of the strange dental conundrums and medical labyrinths he had to get in and then out of, or as far as I can remember.

Sometimes such dilemmas were simple enough, which is to say, they had two horns and he had to choose one or the other.  For instance, an elderly rabbi would come in to have a check-up or to assuage a throbbingly inflamed toothache.  The religious gentleman came in properly on a Sunday morning, take his seat in the chair which could be raised and lowered with a pedal by my father, fold his hands on his lap and wait for the examination and treatment to begin.  Whether he said a blessing quietly to himself or not was none of my father’s concern.  What did matter was this.  A dentist must place a small white cloth around the patient’s neck and over his or her chest to protect the clothing from splashing liquids used in the ensuing operation and the minute fragments of tooth or silver filling churned up by the drill.  But as my father meticulously reached around to secure this bib with two small metal clips on a chain, he suddenly realized that there were two ways he could perform this procedure: either he could place the protective cloth over the rabbi’s beard and thus shield it from the debris of dental surgery or he could tuck the cloth under the lengthy grey beard of the talmudic sage and preserve the gentleman’s dignity and prestige. 

Should he, that is, my father, as the scientific expert, a mayven here, in charge of the surgery hide the beard and thus neutralize the rabbi’s distinctive mark of age and wisdom by enhancing the neutrality of his appearance while the operation went on, the patient becoming in this way a man like other men; or should he, again my father, not only a dentist, a doctor with a speciality in oral hygiene and dental surgery, but also a respectable and respectful member of the Jewish community, a member of the local synagogue, and a regular and  generous donor to Jewish charities, including the Jewish National Fund and the Anti-Defamation League—should he therefore place the bib under the beard and then take special precautions to keep the symbol of mitzvah-performing, kosher-keeping and shabbas-guarding as clean as possible?  Would this last choice compromise his professional standing and his deepest adherence to the scientific principles he had imbibed during his university career?  Would, on the other hand, the first choice, though normal for other patients, yet not necessary for the actual examination or treatment, be a gratuitous insult, a slur and a slander against the essential talmudic principles of respect for the learned, the wise and the elderly? 

As he pondered this dilemma, on the one hand this, on the other that, but what about such and such a protocol and what about the other codes of practice and deportment, my father grew more agitated, his hands began to tremble, and he wondered whether or not he would actually be able to carry out the necessary procedures of his calling. 

At which point, perhaps intuiting from the dentist’s hesitation and nervousness, marked no doubt by changes in his facial expression and wavering or shukeling of his body, the sanitary white cloth moving here and there and back and forth in relation to the patient’s neck and chest, the rabbi spoke: “Nu?” he said, this one Yiddish expression carrying thousands of years of cultural baggage and talmudic knowledge. 

To which my father, trying to seem as poised and professional as possible, responded: “Over or under?”  The sage seemed to grasp at once the nature of the ethical problem, quickly mulled it over in his mind, running through all the permutations and combinations of analogy and linguistic enhancement that midrashic argumentation would allow, and then hastily responded, “So do what you have to do, epis.”  Shocked into action by the cutting logic of this solution to the dilemma, my father stood up tall, and, according to both his inherited ethnic moral code and his licensed scientific principles, he did what he had to do.

A second perplexing problem he had to solve was one in which he required the advice, aid, and cooperation of his life-long friend and professional colleague, the doctor—the medical kind—who had delivered me in 1940 and who, outliving my father by many decades, continued to be a researcher and philosopher of medicine until well into his nineties.  The scientific problem was that when my father began to examine the pains complained about by a certain patient and took the necessary x-rays to discover the source of the aches he discovered something that he had never encountered before.  What is that? you may well ask.  It was that a particular tooth, a molar, if you want to know more precisely, had for some unknown reason at the age when adult teeth begin to erupt, thus pushing out the milk or baby teeth of a child instead of travelling downwards had begun to move upwards.  After several years, when the boy had already turned into a youth and was beginning to transform into a young man, he first experienced a discomfort, or finally realized that the intensity of the pain was becoming unbearable, and hence needed to find some relief from a dentist, a person which aroused in him a dread usually greater than the feelings of agony in his teeth.  What the x-ray revealed was that this unusual upwards direction of growth was leading the tooth directly into the nasal cavity.  My father found this so unusual that he asked the patient to return as soon as possible in order to take another series of roentgen pictures to make sure that he was seeing what he could almost not believe was there, namely, a molar about to erupt inside a person’s nose.

The second round of x-rays confirming this situation, my father telephoned his old friend and colleague, my Uncle Joe the Surgeon, and asked that the next time he came to the house—which was usually every evening, since Uncle Joe was still a bachelor and sought both long evening meals and social conversations in our kitchen virtually every night of the week—to consult with him, as he had, in my father’s meticulous and articulatory words, “a most interesting phenomenon” to share with him.  After enjoying the generous foods laid out on the table by my mother consisting both of left-overs from lunch and dinner that day plus the assorted cold cuts, drinks, pickles, and breads brought in by other regulars—although neither Siggy nor Arthur or any of the others came seven nights a week like Uncle Joe—the two medical professionals began to discuss the phenomenon, my father having brought in two sets of x-rays on hand-held racks, and to grow increasingly excited by what they were seeing and what they were saying as well.  The more they talked, the more they began to formulate a plan, and the plan pleased them increasingly because it would involve the two of them working together, first, to describe the way in which the tooth had failed to erupt in its normal downward trajectory and instead to turn itself around and impel itself into the patient’s nasal cavity; second, to search the medical textbooks for any precedents to this phenomenon and consequently any interventions practiced by other men of science to extract this wandering tooth, whether, that is, to go in through the mouth, in which case my father, as the dental surgeon would be the primary actor in the joint venture, or through the nose, in which case Uncle Joe, as the surgeon proper, would be in charge of the operation, the decision made thus also determining whether the procedure would occur in a dentist’s office or in a hospital; and third, to consider how they would write up their findings and formulate their treatment in preparation for publishing a co-authored study in a scientific journals, the same questions as to the name of the lead author and the kind of journal resting on their agreement finally as to whether this was a dental or a surgical operation.

Neither of these gentlemen, my father or Uncle Joe, despite their excitement and joy at the idea of working together on such an interesting case, could recognize or understand, either at the beginning of their discussions or in later years when they recounted this story to friends and colleagues, the humor of the phenomenon.  When other friends sitting around my mother’s kitchen table listened to them speak, they laughed aloud, and several found their wit stimulated to make a large number of puns, jokes, and other witty remarks, emphasizing the grotesqueness of the image conjured up of a tooth making its appearance in a person’s nose.

In the event, though I don’t recall any of the details and the conclusion itself is hardly more than a blur in my memory, the operation to remove the miswandering tooth happened in a local hospital, Israel Zion on Fort Hamilton Parkway (now known as Maimonides Medical Center),  not too far from where my grandmother used to live before she moved in with us just a year and a half before she died, and because of this all the options that were once possible reduced themselves to those that favored Uncle Joe’s career and not my father’s; and whether or not a learned publication resulted I do not know, but I know for sure that my father never spoke of one and thus, if it did get written up, his input was minimal at best and his name on the title page most unlikely.

And so we come to the third problem in my father’s career as a dentist.  Having gone into the army late in the Second World War—because he assumed his age—already past thirty—and my birth in 1940 would mitigate against his being drafted, he was nevertheless given a not very subtle choice between waiting for the conscription to active duty as an ordinary soldier to come, as they increasingly did amongst older, married men with one child or volunteering for service and gaining a commission as a dentist—he missed out on the opportunity taken by other dentists of using whatever influence they had to stay home and develop their careers. 

Similarly, thanks to his transfer from the European theatre of operations to the Pacific shortly after VE Day—his was, he always told me with a somewhat ironical glint in his eye, the last troopship to go through the Panama Canal on this mission—he did not return to Brooklyn until well into the American occupation of Japan in late 1946, and thus also lost the second opportunity that those dentists who came home soon had of picking up the threads of their practice and grasp the special favors that were offered to those young men willing and able to take part in the move of populations from New York City proper to the new suburbs on Long Island and in New Jersey.  Hence, following his return home, the purchase of a big three-storey house on 47^th Street between 13^th and 14^th Avenue, the birth of my sister in April 1947, the death of my mother’s mother shortly thereafter, and other minor failures and frustrations in his life, not least my mother’s deepening illness—her own depression after the disappearance of her brother in Pearl Harbour, the death of both her parents, the growing awareness of what the not yet named Holocaust meant to any relatives caught up in it during the War: hence, my father decided early in 1950 he ought to rejoin the army and began seriously to negotiate a deal whereby he would become a major and do his dentistry where and how the heads of the recently renamed War Department as the Department of Defence deemed necessary. 

He was scheduled to appear for induction in late June of 1950, but following the invasion of South Korea by the armies of the communist regime to the north on the 25^th of that month, his own intellectual reluctance to become a military man was exacerbated by my mother’s hysterical declarations that he was crazy, he must  want to kill her, and this mishagas would ruin the lives of his two children if he went into the army again.  Naturally, as a child I was unaware of these negotiations and could only feel the mounting tensions in the house, and could not understand the tears, the screams, the banging of doors and other visible and audible signs of this traumatic occasion.  It seemed, at one point, that the world had come to an end.  My gentle, peaceful, patient, and articulate father walked into the kitchen from the front of the house where he had his dental rooms, and as soon as he poked his head in to ask what was to eat, my mother began one of her speeches on the foolishness and danger of his negotiations with the military. I could see him turn red, turn around and around a few times, walk to the coat-rack in the hallway, grab his hat, walk into the kitchen, and throw this hat on the floor.  I had never seen such violence before in my life. My mother went silent, sat down, and started to feed my baby sister. The next morning, when my father was supposed to report to the local army headquarters, the newspapers were full of the news of the invasion of South Korea by a vast and ominous Communist army from the north.  My father did not report for duty.