'Fly for Refuge to the Dentist’s Care'

Thanks to Eric Ormsby and his poem “Dicie Fletcher,” I learned of Solyman Brown (1790-1876), the poet laureate of pyorrhea. Brown was an American dentist and poet, author of Dentologia: A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth (1833). Ormsby used six lines from the fourth of its five cantos as an epigraph to “Dicie Fletcher”: 

“Whene’er along the ivory disks, are seen,

The filthy footsteps of the dark gangrene;

When caries come, with stealthy pace to throw

Corrosive ink spots on those banks of snow–

Brook no delay, ye trembling, suffering fair,

But fly for refuge to the dentist’s care.”

 

We would call “caries” cavities. Poems about unlikely, seemingly unpoetic subjects once were fairly common. For better or worse, our forbears were serious people. James Grainger (1721-1766) wrote The Sugar-Cane: A Poem in Four Books (1764). Book I of William Cowper’s “The Task” is dedicated to “The Sofa.” It begins: “I sing the Sofa.” William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902), often judged “the worst poet in the world” (lots of competition for that title, Messers Ashbery and Bly), gave us “The Tay Bridge Disaster” (1880).

 

Brown was no quack, at least given the state of dentistry in the mid-nineteenth century. He co-founded the American Society of Dental Surgeons in 1840 and wrote a sequel to Dentologia: “Dental Hygeia — A Poem.” In the earlier poem he presciently saw the future popularity of “cosmetic dentistry.” Nothing works better when you're selling something than an appeal to vanity:

 

“The fancied angel vanished into air,

And left unfortunate Urilla there:

For when her parted lips disclosed to view,

Those ruined arches, veiled in ebon hue,

Where love had thought to feast the ravished sight

On orient gems reflecting snowy light,

Hope, disappointed, silently retired,

Disgust triumphant came, and love expired!”

 

In Ormsby’s poem, the title character, a classics teacher, has a sore tooth and at first refuses the dentist’s offer of nitrous oxide: “’I have a horror of unconsciousness,’ she said.” The time is 1881, when laughing gas was still a novelty. No spoilers here. Read the poem.

 

[“Dicie Fletcher” is collected in Ormsby’s Daybreak at the Straits (2004), Time’s Covenant (2007) and The Baboons of Hada (2011).]