Abstract
As part of the prefluoridation generation, however, I was a regular at the dentist's office from a very early age. Unlike the other kids in the village, who were collected in taxis to have their "gumboils" attended to at "gas sessions" in the public dental clinic, my mother took me to the dentist regularly. My mother's nursing textbooks from the 1950s - they had black-and-white line drawings of surgical instruments of the type now found in places like Upper Canada Village - and her stories of hospital life attracted me to a career that was vaguely "medical." In the end, it was the style of the orthodontist, and his earning capacity, that carried the day. I applied to dental school and was accepted. I suppose the same happens to countless others who work in health care and find the toll of caring for "an ungrateful public" too much after a few years. Perhaps the adage I opened with can be modified thus: "If you don't want to be a physician when you are 19, you have no heart, and if you don't want to become a dentist by the time you are 29, you have no head."