Like Having a Baby

Eric K. Curtis, DDS

The dialog must have struck home for the generations of dentists subjected to such patient comments in real life. But what compelling parallels could unite such dissimilar bodily concerns as dental treatment and childbirth in the first place? Perhaps for one thing, both dentistry and delivery were once dangerous, but now routine. For another, both represent the end point of universally understood biological activities, emblematic in their respective ways of the human condition. Both are generally consequences of other, more pleasant, activities. Both are occasionally associated with the use of forceps. "And it is gone," Martin Amis wrote in Experience of having his tooth extracted, "—the gory remnant whisked from my sight like some terrible misadventure from the Delivery Room."

Probably in part a reaction to such phenomena as pregnancy gingivitis, folklore has fostered the curious connection between molars and midwives. Local superstitions have long decreed that a mother should lose a tooth for every baby born. Western popular tradition even identifies a condition known as "married man’s toothache," sympathy pain that torments a husband when his wife becomes pregnant and disappears when the child is born.

Maybe the midwifely mental association with the mouth simply reflects the fact that women were once more likely to be dental patients in the first place. Several studies indicate that for the first seventy or so years of the twentieth century, women went to the dentist more often than men.

Whatever the reasons, the old comparison between odontology and obstetrics still flourishes. Some female patients wield it as a complaint, saying, "I’d rather have a baby than come to the dentist." Many, however, invoke the comparison as if it were a protective mantra. A young woman came to my office once toting an infant in a car carrier bassinet. "I know I need a lot of work," she said, "and my friends told me it was going to hurt. But I’ve just had a baby. How bad can this be?"

Often the correction is overtly positive. In Sue Miller’s novel For Love, the dental-obstetric comparison is the happy culmination of an intense emotional battle symbolized by a growing toothache. Miller’s heroine in the story, Lottie, decides to make a difficult drive home from Boston to Chicago to reunite with her estranged husband. Mile by mile, underscoring Lottie’s discomfort at the approaching reconciliation, her molar throbs ever more insistently. Rolling into town, Lottie heads straight for the dentist’s office.

"‘What a mess, Lottie,’ the dentist says. She can’t answer. ‘Open wide,’ he says. He applies cotton wadding. he pulls it back out, stained. ‘This is your life, eh?’

Lottie laughs, and thinks: "This is why she comes to this dentist. The receptionist...comes in with a damp washcloth. Gratefully Lottie accepts it. She covers her face and wipes it thoroughly. She is talking now, talking and laughing in shaky joy, trying to explain about the tooth, the trip. ‘What a relief!’ she says finally. ‘I can’t believe it. I feel as ecstatic as I did when I gave birth.’"

As Lottie intimates, the relentless analogy between dental care and birthing has become a double symbol of victory over travail. In such triumphs, dental as well as parturitive, the best feeling is none at all. For instance, a while back I was removing a young woman’s broken molar, which featured long, dilacerated, well entrenched roots. I flapped and sectioned, and talked to keep my nervous patient from obsessing over the task at hand.

"That’s what they told me when I had my Cesarean," the woman said when we were finished.

"What was that?" I asked through my mask.

"You said that I was going to be feeling a lot of pushing and pressure. They told me the same thing when I was having my baby. But I didn’t feel anything—either time."