Poetry and dentistry might, at first thought, seem to be two topics that would exclude each other. In reality, there is substantial intertwining, not really surprising when one considers how intimately dentistry is interwoven with the daily fabric of our lives and how poetry intimately explores that daily fabric. In this exhibit you will find displayed a range from poetry by dentists (from doggerel to elegant literary verse) to the reverse -- dental concepts expressed in works by recognized literary poets, even poetry magazines that mention dentistry in their titles.

Poetry By Dentists

Oral health and dental treatment have a stronger presence in poetry and literature than do poetical works by actual dentists. Louis Abbey is not just a dentist and a poet, but also a full professor in oral pathology at Virginia Commonwealth, recognized for his instructional innovations and the creation of a medical humanities program within the VCU School of Dentistry. The poem shown here is about his experiences in war time.

William Guy was not just a dentist and a poet, but President of the British Dental Association. His memoirs (shown here) include a variety of poems he wrote to enliven the meetings and events of the BDA. This poem is the most dental from the memoirs -- about the discovery of the Piltdown mandible, evidently written before the forgery was discovered.

Like Louis Abbey (also highlighted in the first row of the display), Gerald Moore was a practicing dentist who wrote serious poetry, and again like Dr. Abbey, little of this poetry showed any connection to the profession of dentistry. Other dentist-poets include Teresita Aguilar, Solymon Brown, Jorge Fastlicht (UM alumnus), Daniel Thomas Moran, Thomas Evan Nicholas, and Olga de Lucia Vicente. The most curious dentist poet may be Mel Heft, a retired dentist who posed as a famous reclusive Greek poet, Andreas Karavis, and collaborated with another writer to publish books of poetry under this pseudonym as a recent literary hoax.

Solymon Brown was known as a preacher, public speaker, health educator, dentist, essayist, and poet. He might be called either famous or infamous for his poetry, but is certainly the best known of all dentist poets, with two book length poems: Dentologia, a poem on the diseases of the teeth and their proper remedies and Dental Hygeia, a poem on the health and preservation of the teeth. Excerpts from both these were included in the 1997 anthology Very Bad Poetry by Kathryn and Ross Petras, leading to a resurgence of interest in the original works.

This book highlights the creative arts of Louis Lécluse, who authored textbooks on dental anatomy, but also wrote a considerable amount of poetry. He was considered an expert dentist, and received approval from the French monarchy to control manufacture and access to certain medications (orviétan). In addition to dentistry, he was also highly regarded for his poetry, drama, and music -- a true Renaissance man! In this book we find an excerpt from his poetic drama Le Déjeuné de la Rapée (1748), and the music for a rather long and humorous song ("Potpourri" [ L'Ecluse Image]). Another French dental poem is L'Odontotechnie by Julien Marmont, a long poem similar to those by Solymon Brown and from roughly the same era, but in French rather than English.

Poetry In Dental Literature

The early dental periodical literature delighted in publishing dental poetry to enliven the pages of research and clinical findings, along with other varieties of wit and wisdom to enrich the perceptions of professionals in the still fledgling field. In keeping with the tendency to republish articles from one journal in another, the dental poems were often originally excerpted from popular magazines and newspapers, such as this example from an author better known for writings on the Wild West.

On the cover of this new collection of dental limericks by Dr. and Mrs. Christen, you see highlighted the popular topics of pain in dentistry [Limerick Image] and dental bills. These topics echo the sentiments expressed in such well-known poems as "My Dentist" by Robert William Service ("Sitting in the dentist's chair / Wishing that I wasn't there"), "Address to the Toothache" by Robert Burns ("My curse upon your venom'd stang, / That shoots my tortur'd gums alang"), or "Rheumatism" by Josiah Dean Canning ("Toothache, forsooth, is bad enough, / But there's a remedy, tho' rough; / Step to the dentist in a huff, / ... One gentle wrench! and all is done"). References to these topics are not uncommon in poetry, and are touched on in poetry from ancient times through modern.

This delightful short piece ("The dentist is the baddest man") is reprinted here from an Irish newspaper, and ends with a child wishing to grow up to be a dentist [Greve Image]. Dentists, as persons, are not often portrayed in poetry. Kizer's "A Long Line of Doctors", Kooser's "The Death of the Dentist" and Edgar Lee Masters' "Sexsmith the Dentist" are notable exceptions. It is more likely that you would find descriptions of being in a dentist's chair as in Robert Service's "My Dentist", Weldon Kees "The Furies" ("A clown, who shudders and suddenly / Is a man with a mouth of cotton / Trapped in a dentist's chair"), or Brenda Hillman's "Little Philokalia: A Beauty Makeover" ("the tiny himalayas of acoustic tile on the dentist's ceiling"). Not expected are poetry journals with dental titles, such as Mastodon Dentist.

If poems about dentistry are neither typical nor unusual, and poems by or about dentists are rare, poetry relating to dental hygienists are virtually non-existent. Here we show a rare example by the famous physical anthropologist and iconoclast, Earnest Albert Hooten. The lines "To me no woman can be smarter / Than she who scales away my tartar, / And none more fitted to be my bride / Than one who knows me from inside. / At least as far as she has gotten / She sees how much of me is rotten." seem perfectly in tune with the gentleman who also said, "You know, none of my students have been yes men. Thank God!"

Dental & Oral Health Concepts in Poetry

False teeth are another dental topic omnipresent in popular culture, especially in poetry of the past couple centuries. In this recent poem by Linda Dyer, she describes her mother's new teeth and expresses a desire for the natural look to return. Other well-known poems on this topic include "The Ballad of Arabella" by Trowbridge and "The Front Tooth" by Service. Both these poems describe how dentistry has aided women in presenting a cosmetically pleasing appearance. Perhaps the most amusing denture poem is "Teeth in Peace" by Herbert Nehrlich ("Out in the bathroom, / on the sink were sitting still, / in a tall glass two dentures / fresh and rosy / and they could kiss all night / in total privacy.") More tender is "Dental Record by Alexander John, about the making of a bridge for his wife ("But this plaster mount, / this silly trophy / of an expensive procedure, / the least the dentist could give, / still sits hauntingly on the shelf, / a statue-too-soon, / an extraction / of a very real but unknowable section / of her / that I can't otherwise see / but that will remain / long after she is truly gone.")

Martina Evan's new book of poetry literally begins and ends with dentistry! The first poem in the book is called "Gas" ("Little did I think, / nailed by pain / and wandering / squeezing hands / in my first dentist's chair, / that I would be running / down the road / to my second sea-side / dentist / who had great gas / in a cylinder in his surgery."). The last poem is the title poem, and catalogs the dentists she has known ("There are the ones / you only visit once ... / Others, you have to stay with.").

With a verbal sleight of hand, Kostis Ghimosoulis in the poem "A Successful Poem" makes an analogy between writing quality poetry and filling cavities, in a most ironic way ("In other words / with something solid you have sealed / the hollow place / which pain had occupied."). The companion poem here, "Grind the Big Tooth", is an elaboration of a Greek colloquial metaphor ("the big tooth") which, in American English, might be more closely rendered as "the big cheese" -- an important person.

This small poem about teeth was published only a couple years ago, but is reminiscent of a haiku, such as this by Bassho (1600s): "Teeth sensitive to the sand / in salad greens -- / I'm getting old" or this by Issa on his retirement (1800s): "The tucked away cottage -- / No teeth in the mouth now, / But, luck's in the house!). A modern dental haiku is "dentist surgery? / my tooth throbs to the rhythm / of heavy metal music" by Janice M. Bostok.
The poem shown here ("The brown stumps") is not identified as to which is the author, however we suspect it was Jim Harrison, since dental and oral health concerns appear in many of his other writings. Kooser's best known dental poem is "The Death of the Dentist." Harrison's poems include "Returning to Earth" ("I can let my mouth rot and quit / writing poems. I could let the dentist / write the poems while I walked into the dark / with a tray of golden teeth I'd sculpt / for myself in the forms of shark's teeth, / lion's teeth, teeth of grizzly and python."), "Rich Folks, Poor, Folks, and Neither" ("Rich folks keep their teeth / until late in life, / and park their cars in heated garages."); "Locations" ("even Greenland / where dentists stalk polar bears from Cessnas") and his new novella, The Summer He Didn't Die, begins, "What is life that I must get teeth pulled?"

There is a wealth of rhyme and ritual related to how to banish tooth pain. Many pieces in this genre are folkloric and lack an author. This 20^th-century example by Health-Stubbs has a very modern flavor to it, and seems to focus on the experiences of sufferer. There is an Early English 1400s poem with a similar title ("A charme for the tethe werke" [Charm Image]) that incorporates Christian prayer and ritual into the banishment of the toothache ("I conjur thee, loathsome beast, with that spear / That long in his hand he did bear / And also with one hat of thorn / That on my Lord's head was borne É ").

John Lehman, in the somber title poem of this collection, uses the tooth fairy myth as a connection between the generations, with parent carrying on the tradition as a connection between his own parents and his child. "Myths teach that one possessing a part of our body / has power over us / if we are to be resurrected whole. / Is that seed I can never retrieve the ancient / strength my sleeping son has over me? / There is real magic here. É / I rub the tooth beneath my forefinger and thumb. / The moon is rising. It is an egg, a skull, / the dome of a mosque made of teeth."

"Your baby grows a tooth, then two ..." and so begins Thomas Lux's tender poem on a child growing up. Lux is not the only poet to write about a child's first tooth, with the best-known poem on this topic probably being "The First Tooth" by Charles and Mary Lamb, who wrote during the early 1800s. Other poems on this topic are "The First Tooth by William Brighty Rand

Possibly the most unexpected poem in this exhibit, this describes Daniel Boone extracting his own sore tooth with a rifle flint. An apocryphal story? Perhaps. Better documented is the story of Daniel Boone's loose front tooth, gained as a young man in a fistfight over what turned out to be a misunderstanding, but the tooth wobbled for the rest of his life. Robert Lowell, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, wrote about loose teeth in his late-life meditation on suicide -- "Sometimes in dreams / my teeth got loose in my mouth ... / Tinker, Tailor, Sailor, Sailor -- / they were cherrystones, / as I spat them out."

"In the Waiting Room" by Elizabeth Bishop, in which she describes her aunt's visit to the dentist, is probably the most anthologized modern poem about dentistry. Other well known modern poems about dentistry would have to include include Marge Piercy's "The Root Canal"; May Swenson's "After the Dentist"; Ed Orchester's "My Teeth"; and William Dickey's "A Poet's Farewell to His Teeth."

Selected Dental Poetry Excerpts & Quotations:

Yesterday,
when he smiled, showing his aligned teeth,
   (and dentistry can make miracles)
my face jolted,
myopic, I pretended to watch the passersby.

Stranger! approach this spot with gravity;
John Brown is filling his last cavity.

The dentist's teeth at the corner in pale rows,
which grin at progress, in an epigram.

Where was I? -- Mr. O'Tolmach knows a man
Who goes to Mr. Verger's dentist: so
You see it must be true he has no teeth.

But cracking them --
the butternuts, that is, though Rose Marie's
handwriting can be pretty near as hard --
takes hammer and anvil, and generally it means
bloody fingers and nutshells in your cookies
and a visit to the dentist. Who needs that?

Cigar-stained and tired of cavities, you leave.
It is time to go back to the pure world of teeth
And rest, and compose yourselves for the last eruption. ...
I hope you relax by the shadowy root canals,
And thinking of me with kindness, but not regret,
Toast me just once in the local anaesthetic.

Little Tommy said, to his mother,
"Then we have to throw yours away too.
Last week when it fell in the toilet
I didn't know what you're s'posed to do."

First glimpse of the pearl
I cup in my clammy hand
outside a mirror:
chastened as crystal I sit,
digesting mortality

I owe the dentist nine hundred dollars.
This is more than I made on three
of my books of poems. But then I am gloriously
free. I can let my mouth rot and quit
writing poems. I could let the dentist
write the poems while I walked into the dark
with a tray of golden teeth I'd sculpt
for myself in the forms of shark's teeth,
lion's teeth, teeth of grizzly and python.
Watch me open my mouth as I wear these wondrous
teeth. The audience gross is exactly nine hundred!
The house lights dim. My lips part.
There is a glimpse of sun.

No! Pay the dentist when he leaves
  A fracture in your jaw,
And pay the owner of the bear
  That stunned you with his paw,
And buy the lobster that has had
  Your knuckles in his claw;

Call to her, Voltaire, amid the wreck
Of her fair-mindedness; descended from a line
Of stiff physicians: dentists are beyond
The iron palings, the respectable brass plate,
Illegible Latin script, the chaste degrees.
Freezing, she acknowledges the mechanic, welder, wielder
Of pliers, hacker, hawker, barber -- Spit it out, please.
Worst of all, this dentist advertises.

I think. -- "O! Fortune, why presentest
To all mankind gifts so irrelevant?
My teeth demand a constant dentist,
While he is ivoried like an elephant.
"Why probe us with these sharp reminders,
Why still in cornu habes foenum?
Send roasts and nuts to carious grinders,
While millstone jaws get naught between 'em?

Have any of you, passers-by,
Had an old tooth that was an unceasing discomfort?
Or a pain in the side that never quite left you?
Or a malignant growth that grew with time?

Why, a moral truth is a hollow tooth
Which must be propped with gold.

Hip calls
"Take out your false teeth, Mama,
Let Daddy suck your gums" ...
Fish skeletons in his van's wastebasket
might be going
to be a word. They are almost teeth,
they have been sucked clean.

English Teeth! HEROES' Teeth!
Hear them click! and clack!
Let's sing a song of praise to them --
Three Cheers for the Brown Grey and Black.

Leaving aside my adventures among the dentists --
"Your teeth are fine, but those gums have got to go" --
My skirmishes with medicine include
But a couple of major operations and a few
Discomfortable bothers with skeleton and strings.

The up-front ones are marvelous,
tiny dancers braving the wind,
shapely and disciplined.
But behind them, corruption,
molars who have lived riotously,
roots eaten by secret lusts
as their bodies disintegrate.
Even the bicuspids and incisors
are infected,
blood swollen
around stiff afflictions of plaque.

This tooth is hollowed out to a cave
Big enough for tourists
To go through in parties with guides
In flat-bottomed boats.
... I am nothing,
nothing at all, but a reluctant
pyramid standing here, a grandiose
talking headstone for my tooth.

Such a sugar has come to the tooth
That had all the sorrow and grief
That one's mouth stays open and starts laughing.

Then one night when I called on him
   Oh what a change I saw!
His head was bowed, his eye was dim,
   Down-fallen was his jaw.
Said he: 'Leave me to die, I pray;
   I'm no more bloody use . . .
For in my mouth I found today --
   A tooth that's loose.'

"What makes ye look so sweet. me dearie?
As if ye'd gotten back yer youth . . . ."
Says I: "It's just me new front tooth."

I am a Christian Scientist;
I don't believe in pain;
My dentist had a powerful wrist,
He tries and tries in vain
To make me grunt or groan or squeal
With probe or rasp or drill. . . .
But oh, what agony I feel
When HE PRESENTS HIS BILL!

... Fish seem
to have so little regard for pain. My husband sighs and
attempts to hide his swollen jaw. He'd much rather be
pulling a treble hook out of a smallmouth bass up at
Caballo Lake in spring.

"TAKE pains," growled the Tooth to the Dentist;
"The same," said the Dentist, "to you."
Then he added, "No doubt,
Before you are out
You'll have taken most pains of the two."

And must you see the dentist
For every tooth you break?
And are you apt from eating nuts
To get the stomach-ache?

From her interesting features then her handkerchief she took,
Opened wide those lovely lips of hers, and hoarsely whispered, "Look!"
All that dazzling row had vanished! Birch's blood within him froze;
But he quickly said, "I love youÑlove you still, in spite of those!"
 
"But you do not, oh! you do not, see the point, dear Colonel, yet:
Full five weeks it took my dentist to get up that splendid set;
And, alas! I 've been and lost 'em where you can't go down and search,
And how can a woman give her hand -- without her teeth -- in church?

"Arabella's teeth, by Heaven!" -- Brown has seized them, and, behold!
In their "Milky Way of whiteness" there 's his little "star of gold,"
Where the dentist, more completely to disguise the vulgar truth,
By a masterly device had plugged an artificial tooth!

It was early Autumn
and my hands were full
with the usual slew
of pimpled teenagers
plagued with gingivitis,
long evenings of haunting
nursing homes, hovering
gloriously over deathbeds, waiting
for the eternity of rotten teeth
to wiggle from black gums.

To have it out or not? that is the question --
Whether 'tis better for the jaws to suffer
The pangs and torments of an aching tooth,
Or to take steel against a host of troubles,
And, by extracting, end them? To pull, to tug!
No more: and by a tug to say we end
The tooth-ache, and a thousand natural ills
The jaw is heir to.

It's toothbrush time,
  ten a.m. again
  and toothbrush time.
Last night at half-past nine it seemed OK
But in the light of day
  not so fine
  at toothbrush time

When the nerve is alive, and the dentist cuts and grinds,
There are fully fifty pains he invariably finds.
There are pains that are hot, there are pains that are cold,
There are big and swelling pains that the mouth can hardly hold,
There are pains like a needle, there are pains like a saw,
There are pains that explode and other pains that gnaw --
When the nerve of the tooth is alive.

Now, he is brushing his teeth
with one hand, the other
tapping the water softly
as if to the tune of a playful sitar.
A half-cremated body floats by.

Bibliography and Additional Sources

"An Epic Poem on Dental Hygiene." Jacksonian Miscellanies 72 (1998). URL: <http://www.earlyrepublic.net/jm981110.htm>

Abbey, Louis M. "Broken Silence". Blood & Bone. Edited by Angelica Belli & Jack Coulehan. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. Dentistry Library: PS 591 . P48 B581 1998

Bassho. "Teeth sensitive." The Essential Haiku. Ed. By Robert Hass. NY: HarperCollins, 1994, p.47.

Bishop, Elizabeth. "In the Waiting Room." The Poetry of Our World. An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jeffrey Paine. New York : Perennial, 2001. Shapiro Undergraduate Library: PN 6101 .P54251 2000

Bostok, Janice M. "dentist surgery?" Stylus Poetry Journal. URL: <http://www.styluspoetryjournal.com/main/master.asp?id=377>

Bouquet poëtique des médecins, chirurgiens, dentistes & apothicaires. Ed. Pascal Pia. Paris: Collection de l'Écritoire, 1933. Dentistry Library (Rare Books): PQ 150 .P4 B68 1933

Brinistool, E. A. "Ye Dentist Man." Dental Review 13 1899:228. URL: <http://www.lib.umich.edu/dentlib/denthist/articles/Brinistool1899.html>

Brown, Solymon. Dentologia. NY: Peabody, 1833. Dentistry Library (Rare): RK 61 .B886. URL: <http://www.dcdentistry.com/dentologia.htm>

[Brown, Solymon. Dental Hygeia.] "An Epic Poem on Dental Hygiene." Jacksonian Miscellanies 72 (1998). URL: <http://www.earlyrepublic.net/jm981110.htm>

"XIX. Charm for the toothache." Religious pieces in prose and verse, ed. From Robert Thornton's ms. (cir. 1440) in the Lincoln Cathedral Library, by George G. Perry. London: Early English Text Society, 1981 (1867, 1914), p. 119-120.

Christen, Joan A.; Christen, Arden G. Limericks with a Smile: Dental, Oral and Facial Limericks of Yesterday and Today. Indianapolis, Indiana: Department of Oral Biology, Indiana University School of Dentistry, 2005.

"The dentist is the baddest man." Aphorismen zur Kulturgeschichte der Zahnheilkunde und des zahnärztlichen Standes. Ed. By Christian Greve. Leipzig: Georg Thieme Verlag, 1930. Dentistry Library Catalog: Rare Books Ð RK 51.5 .G792 1930

Dyer, Linda, Fictional Teeth: Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 2001. Hatcher Graduate Library: 828 D99663fi

Evans, Martina. Can Dentists Be Trusted? London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2004. Hatcher Graduate Library: PR 6122 .V36 C36 2004

Fastlicht, Jorge. Pensamientos. Mexico: D. F., 1988. Dentistry Library: PQ 6651 .A855 A6 1988

Grind the Big Tooth, a collection of contemporary Greek poetry. Robert Crist, translator. Pittsburgh, PA : Sterling House Publisher, 1998.

Guy, William, Mostly Memories, Some Digressions. Edinburgh: C. J. Cousland & Sons, Ltd., 1948. Dentistry Library Catalog: RK 43 .G98 A3

Harrison, Jim & Ted Kooser, Braided Creek. A Conversation in Poetry. Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2003. Hatcher Graduate Library: 828 H3195br

Heath-Stubbs, John Francis Alexander. A Charm Against the Toothache. London: Methuen, 1954.

Hillman, Brenda. "Little Philokalia: A Beauty Makeover" Electronic Poetry Review #2 (2001). <http://www.poetry.org/issues/spring01/text/prose/hillman.html>

Hooten, Earnest Albert. "Ode to a Dental Hygienist." (1942) The Best of Dental Humor, ed. By Stephen Sonis. Philadelphia: Hanley & Belfus, 1997. Dentistry Library: RK 51.5 .B471 1997.

Janeczko, Paul B. Dont Forget to Fly. Scarsdale, NY: Bradbury Press, 1981.

John, Alexander. "Dental Record." KotaPress Poetry Journal 4(7) July 2003. URL: <http://www.kotapress.com/journal/Archive/Journal_V4_Issue07(Jul03)/journal13.htm>

Kees, Weldon. "The Furies." URL: <http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Weldon-Kees/3035>

Kooser, Ted. "The Death of the Dentist." Not Coming to Be Barked At. 1976.

Lamb, Charles & Mary. "The First Tooth." URL: <http://www.storyit.com/Classics/JustPoems/firsttooth.htm>

Lehman, John, Shrine of the Tooth Fairy. Poems of Love, Childhood, Magic and Revenge. Cambridge, Wisconsin: Cambridge Book Review Press, 1998.

Lowell, Robert. "Suicide." Day by Day. NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977, p. 15-16.

Lux, Thomas. "A Little Tooth." New & Selected Poems 1975-1995. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997. Hatcher Graduate Library: 828 L9768 1997. URL: <http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Thomas-Lux/1790>

Manning, Maurice, A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Cook of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, etc. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2004. Hatcher Graduate Library: 828 M28328cn

Marmont, Julien. L'odontotechnie, ou, L'art du dentiste : poëme didactique et descriptif en quatre chants ; dédié aux dames. Paris : l'Auteur, 1825. URL: <http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica/cote?APHPF00097>

Moore, Gerald Ernest. The Singing Dust. (with Odette Tchernine). London: Spearman, 1976. Dentistry Library (Cage): PR 6070 .C5 S6 1976

Nehrlich, Herbert. "Teeth in Peace." URL: <http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poem=991463>

Oehser, Paul H., "Solyman Brown's Dentologia". American Scientist 36(4) 1948:573. Dentistry Library (Cage): RK 61 .B886 1948

Mastodon Dentist, a Poetry Magazine. URL: <http://www.mastodondentist.com/>