“cruz del sur”
A reflection after J.L. Borges
A librarian in Buenos Aires heard it from a man who once treated a patient who claimed to have been present at the invention of the drill.
“In the unfathomable archives of human suffering, there exists a dark and branching corridor. A via dolorosa of enamel and nerve.
“For centuries, men with steel instruments (descendants, perhaps, of the torturer’s tools of the Inquisition) believed that to cleanse a tooth, one must first wound it.
“The drill was their chosen implement, a humming, shrieking thing that turned the mouth into a battleground.
“I have seen patients enter those chambers white-knuckled, gripping the arms of the chair as if it were the edge of a precipice. They emerged shaken, their teeth saved, yes, but their memory of the ordeal etched deeper than any filling.
“Then, like a whisper in the infinite Library of Babel, another way appeared. It came not from the grand halls of European dentistry, but from the quiet pragmatism of those who worked in places where electricity was a luxury, and pain a needless extravagance.
“Atraumatic Restorative Treatment (ART) required no drill, no needle, no conquest. Only a hand steady enough to lift decay as one lifts a page from an ancient manuscript—careful, precise, leaving the structure beneath intact.
“I once met a dentist in Adrogué who told me this: A tooth is not an enemy. It is a text. Written in calcium and collagen, its history visible in every stain, every fracture. To read it properly, one must not burn the pages.
“He demonstrated ART with the patience of a scribe restoring a palimpsest. The glass ionomer he used was a kind of mirror. Not the cold, reflective kind, but the sort that absorbs and becomes part of what it touches.
“Now, the old ways persist in places, like echoes of a dream no one remembers dreaming. But in certain clinics, in certain hands, the violence has been unmasked as superstition.
“A child sits in the chair. There is no scream of machinery. Only the quiet scrape-scrape of a hand instrument, the patient press of cement. The child leaves curious, unharmed. The tooth remains, not conquered, but mended.
“And so the story folds inward, as all good stories do. The drill, once king, now seems destined for the museum of obsolete horrors. ART is not new—it is a rediscovery, a return to the oldest truth: Healing need not be a war.
“I cannot say if ART is the future. But I know it is already the past—a path we forgot, then found again, like a verse misplaced in the universe’s endless library.”