Time Travel Careers
Due to (gestures widely), it’s been a long time since I saw one of my childhood best friends, who is now a dentist. When we recently got together, we somehow started talking about time travel romances, because obviously that’s what you do. I told her I had read a whole lot of romances with time-traveling doctors or nurses or “herbalists,” but never a dentist. (Dentist romance novels are generally thin on the ground – in crafting this tag, I found almost as many dentist villains and exes – and even a serial killer – as I did dentist heroes and heroines. Romancelandia, are you working through some issues??). If she time-traveled, I asked, would she be able to do better than the dentists of yore?
To my surprise, she told me no. Too much of what she could do to help people was dependent on technology. She wouldn’t have x-rays for diagnostics, anesthetics for treatments, fluoride for prevention, composites for filling cavities, or antibiotics for oral infections. On the whole, she’d know a lot more than the village blacksmith about what was going on, but she wouldn’t be able to treat anybody much more effectively.
Meanwhile, I’ve been doing physical therapy for a few months to help me recover from a shoulder injury, and I’ve been surprised by how enormously low-tech it is. My exercises have involved things like leaning against a wall, putting a rag on the table and stretching over it, and crawling my fingers up a wall to reach overhead. A relative who had a stroke did PT over the last year for swallowing, which involved things like practicing swallowing with his tongue between his front teeth. A good physical therapist could be an invaluable health care provider, whether they landed in the Regency, the Jacobite Rising, or even the Middle Ages. Imagine our protagonist restoring a wounded knight to fighting form with a series of sexy stretches, or a neglected nineteenth century invalid finding increased mobility and relief from pain. The possibilities!!!
(We don’t have a physical therapist tag. We’ve reviewed maybe a dozen books starring PTs but most of them don’t have high grades. Two we did love are Adult Assembly Required by Abbi Waxman and American Sweethearts by Adriana Herrera)
What unusual time-travel occupation would you like to see? Would your profession be useful in the past or not? (I’m a historian, which would suck, since we’d know what was coming and also be completely paralyzed by whether or not to try to do anything about it). In general, is time travel a trope you’re still into (I haven’t seen many time travel romances lately)? Why or why not?
~ Caroline Russomanno
A dentist wouldn’t be able to treat cavities, do root canals, or a host of other things, but oral hygiene would actually make a huge difference if they could convince the people around them to give it a try. If she could knock together a decent tooth paste and brush, most problems would be solved before they started.
The ancient Romans had toothpaste. People in the past did better than we think. The big advantages in modern toothpastes are chemical which wouldn’t be manufacturable.
Pierre Fauchard, considered the father of modern dentistry, said those pastes were more harmful than helpful. The ancient Romans used goat’s milk and urine in theirs and did not have a bristle brush, so hopefully, a modern dentist could steer people in a better direction. And really, it would depend on when you were sent back. Europe and America had tooth powders with chemicals by the 1800s. Just not the right chemicals.
I haven’t read many time travel books in a while but I have seen and read more time loop books recently.(Groundhog Day theme).
Interesting post Caroline! Love the observation that PT can be so low tech. I would think that just rinsing one’s mouth after eating, and massaging gums/between teeth might have made a huge difference for folks? Also, better diets would have helped as well.
As far as future books, I think cooking in general might be interesting . . . although how an author would choose to compensate for new and/or lack of local ingredients could be a creative challenge. For example, didn’t some western explorer/visitors to South America think that tomatoes were poisonous?
I disagree with your friend! If she’d gone back before the1850s, before the work of Joseph Lister, she’d have been able to heal simply by washing her hands before treating patients. Knowing about Pasteur’s work would have allowed her to know that heat treated infection. John Snow’s work would enable her to treat patients with clean water.
There is, of course, the issue faced by Claire Randall–one would have to hide one’s knowledge in order to not be accused of witchcraft!
I guess she would say that she’d be able to do less harm than the historical dentists, but she wouldn’t actually be able to fix problems any better than they could.
I think that’s wild–I don’t know of any medical people that would say that! But, I’m sure she knows more about dentistry than do I!
Given that she won’t be able to do any treatment, she probably won’t be able to fix a lot of things. I can’t imagine doing a root canal without contemporary tools, for example.