Here is the first thing I want you to hear from me, before anything else, so you can decide whether to keep reading.
I don't know.
I don't know, all the way down, how the disease in a mouth reaches the rest of a person. Nobody does. I have spent twenty years with my hands inside the jaw, and I am telling you that first so you will believe the rest.
Here is what I do know. In 1840, in Baltimore, two men asked whether the mouth could be taught inside medicine. The answer, the way the story comes down to us, was that the subject was of little consequence. So dentistry built its own school, and the body was split in two. Separate schools. Separate degrees. Separate records: your physician cannot see your gum chart to this day. Separate science, as if the mouth had its own bloodstream.
I was trained inside that split. So were you, whichever side of it you stand on. I named this after the year it happened because I intend to undo it, and because a wound is easier to close when you can say where it is.
Not knowing is allowed. Being closed is not.
Medicine is very good at the shape of the aftermath. We can read damage the way a geologist reads a cliff. What we are poor at is the long, quiet stretch before a thing has a name, when it is still moving and still yours to move. Most of that stretch is unmapped. I would rather say so than draw a confident line through it.
So this movement begins with an empty space. Not a gap I am embarrassed about, a space I am keeping open on purpose, the way you leave a chair for the person who hasn't arrived. What we don't know yet lives there. We're looking.
What these letters are
Six letters, one move each:
The unknown. This one.
Undo 1840. The split, the verdict, and the training.
Kairos. The window in which a thing can still be changed.
Time, space, scale. Three windows to look through.
Connections. The body keeps no departments, and the wall talks back.
The skills we have. Everything I need to begin is already in the room.
After the letters comes the platform behind the movement, when it is ready to be shown. It learns your body, and then it fights for it.
One ask
If you are a clinician, reply with one sentence: the last time a patient asked you "how long has that been there?" and what you said. If you are the patient, tell me what you were told. I read every reply. The honest ones become the material.
Every claim I make in these letters carries a grade and the experiment that would kill it. The library is open now.
Now we move.
Thad Connelly
Oral and maxillofacial surgeon