Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1883 — The Dentist. [ARTICLE]

The Dentist.

We never enter a dentist’s studio without feeling uneasy. Not that we have any tgeth which we cannot easily remove without his aid, but still we are awe-struck in his qiresence. It appears that our teeth have gone into commit-., tee of the whole and move by platoons; so we are not afraid of a sudden and unexpected attack on any stragglers, still we remember what a time we once had with the old, back-number teeth, and wince in sympathetic memory. The rooms of these artists in bicuspids and molars are no places for quiet and cosy little chats on the follies of the day or the lighter and more frivolous topics of society. The conscience of a dentist must be something like that of a champion butcher, who kills and strings up his victim, ready-dressed for the market, in three minutes by a stop-watch, Chicago time. A thoroughly-good dentist should be a man with nerves like chilled steel and heart like live-oak. Some of the dentists with whom we are on speaking terms are. oily fellows, with hands as soft as a dude’s cranium, and a seductive voice likea that of a drug clerk. He will meet you at the door wrapped in a winning smile and a spotted dress-ing-gown, and talk to you as soothingly as could a speculator in mining stocks, and he will inveigle you into the highbacked inquisitorial chair, and lie to vou aboiit the pain, and root around your sore and throbbing gums with his thumb-nail, and al 1 tlie. time smiling like an px-eyed violet. The next thing you know trouble will commence. He will slip on a pair of highly-polished forceps; there will be an uncontrollable desire on your part to open wude your mouth and howl. A short, decisive jerk, your poor head will fall back on the chair, and your mouth will be full of freshly-distilled blood; your eyes will be brimming with tears, and a miscellaneous variety of cuss words will be struggling for utterance in your larrryx. But it is tlie old-fashioned dentist,the country doctor of the cross-roads, who used te grin like a cannibal whenever he saw a victim approach his office—he is the one who used to fill the apple of our youthfuDeye. He was a terror. He, who has never been put through the agonizing evolutions of a tooth-pulling drill in the back room of his office, does not know what fun is. He has missed several great oppcrt inities. This rural tooth-carpenter used to perpetrate his fiendish work in one time and two motions. If tie parient could not keep his head steady the dentist would lay his head on the floor and hold it down with his knee. And if the man got alive to his family, who had parted from him with sorrowful apprehensions, the meruliers would meet him with congratulations, and fried chicken and-bis-cuits,’that he was unable to eat. This ancient gladiatorial dentist was as remorseless in his operations as a lynching mob. He had no Sympathy at all for a patient. To him a toothache was a a sardonic joke. And, when he threw* a man on to the floor, put'his knee on his chest and the turnkeys on the wrong tooth and straightened himself, it did seem as though the last end of that man had come, and waA a great deal worse than the first—Texas Siftings.