One of my chief objections to dentists is that they will never listen to
reason; explanations are quite thrown away on them. They only let you talk
at all in order to get your face open, and then into it they plunge their
powerful antiseptic-tasting hands and you lose something. I never go near a
dentist without paying the extreme penalty. (None of those cunning little
gold-tipped caps or reinforced concrete suspension-bridges for me. Out it
comes. Blood and iron every time). I admit they frequently appease my
anguish. Almost invariably among the teeth of which they relieve me at each
sitting is included the offending one. But still I maintain my right to
have a say in my own afflictions. The doctors let one. I've got a physician
who lets me have any disease I fancy (except German measles and Asiatic
cholera; for patriotic reasons he won't hear a good word spoken for either
of them; says we've got just as good diseases of our own. Damned
insularity!).

If I send for this doctor he comes along, sits quietly beside my bed,
eating my grapes, while I tell him where the pain isn't. The recital over
he hands me a selection of ailments to pick from. I choose one. He tells me
what the symptoms are, drinks my invalid port, creeps downstairs and breaks
the news to the hushed and awe-stricken family. A chap like that makes
suffering a pleasure and is a great comfort in a home like mine, where a
sick bed is the only sort you are allowed to lie in after 10 A.M. Without
the fellow's ready sympathy I doubt if I should secure any sleep at all.
One gets no assistance of that kind from dentists, although they give you
more pain in ten seconds than a doctor does in ten years.

No dentist ever sees me home after the slaughter, orders me a diet of
chicken breast, _pêche Melba_ and champagne, or warns my family that I am
on no account to be disturbed until lunch. No, they jerk your jaw off its