Benjamin Hanby Goes to the Dentist by Alan Borer

In Great Britain, the days after Christmas are traditionally days for telling ghost stories.  Charles Dickens, who gave us A Christmas Carol, is after all, a ghost story at heart.  Although the tradition has died out in Britain’s rebellious colonies, I thought it would be appropriate to share a tale of blood-curdling horror and gut-wrenching terror in this post Christmas break by retelling a story by Westerville’s favorite son Benjamin Hanby.

            Beyond his songs, Hanby left little in the way of writing.  A few letters survive, but there is no central repository to examine them.  Fortunately, a few morsels can be dug from issues of the Religious Telescope, the newspaper of the United Brethren Church.  Newspapers welcomed letters, which were used for what passed for news articles.  Here, for example, is the story of Benjamin Hanby’s trip to Baltimore, Maryland, on behalf of United Brethren business.  In Hanby’s own words, we read of his return trip via Boonsborough (also in Maryland):

“Two miles were barely accomplished when a new difficulty set it.  All the teeth on the left side of my head began to ache at once, and with such intensity that it was really surprising – the unanimity and harmony of action among them.  I have since talked to a friend who believes that all diseases are diabolical.  I am inclined to believe it is true in two instances at least; namely:  Job’s complaint and the neuralgia.

            Here was a case that calls for sympathy from all your readers.  Let each imagine

(1)   that he has to travel half a day over the mountains,

(2)   in chilly, damp weather,

(3)   in a close coach,

(4)   unable to decide whether he is going in the right or wrong direction to conference,

(5)   with his teeth dancing out of their sockets in a grand carnival of pain, and,

(6)   that he is an agent of Otterbein University!

A combination of horrors truly.  Not one moment from that time to the present, (nearly three weeks), has your correspondent been entirely free from pain.  The dentists have made examination, not an unsound tooth to be found.  They pronounced the ‘wisdom tooth’ to be the cause of the whole trouble – crowding the others too hard.  It was extracted a week ago, (the dentist declaring it one of the most difficult operations of the kind he had ever performed), and here the pain is yet, assisted by an attack of quinsy, and contraction of the muscles of the jaw rendering it almost impossible to talk or to eat; two very inconvenient restrictions on a voluble man with a naturally good appetite.”[i]

(not Hanby, but a near contemporary)

            Many of us tend to believe that smiling was unknown before 1900, or that evangelicals before the Civil War wore a permanent frown.  There is no way to count the dour of the nineteenth century.  Life was so much harder than that we can scarcely imagine.  But Benjamin Hanby was known for his cheerfulness.  That he could write a cheerful description of major dental work without novocain proves it.

- Alan Borer

[i] Benjamin R. Hanby to ‘Brother L.,’ in The Religious Telescope, Dayton, March 23, 1859.