[johniegrad]

Not surprising at all.

When I was in medical school, I roomed with a number of dental students.

One of their ongoing assignments was to use instruments to carve small wax blocks into identical replicas of each tooth in the mouth.

They would spend hours on the things and sometimes had to redo them completely if rejected by their professors.

Dentists have to have patience, good visual-spatial skills, and the ability to persist over what, to me, was incredibly tedious tasks.

It is no surprise that a dentist would do something as intricate and detailed as this.

[DocRock]

"One of their ongoing assignments was to use instruments to carve small wax blocks into identical replicas of each tooth in the mouth."

I grew up in the gemstone industry and spent most of my free time in my father's gemological laboratory. The rest of my free time I spent building models and my skills exceeded my age. When I finally traveled to see our goldsmiths in Hong Kong as a young man, I knew that my model building skills were better than most of their jewelry making skills, so I became a custom jeweler. We carve wax to cast jewelry, just like your dentist friends carve teeth to cast. I just started with models instead of wax.

[MarkL]

Not surprising at all.

When I was in medical school, I roomed with a number of dental students.

One of their ongoing assignments was to use instruments to carve small wax blocks into identical replicas of each tooth in the mouth.

They would spend hours on the things and sometimes had to redo them completely if rejected by their professors.

Dentists have to have patience, good visual-spatial skills, and the ability to persist over what, to me, was incredibly tedious tasks.

It is no surprise that a dentist would do something as intricate and detailed as this.

I agree. My grandfather was a dentist, and eventually became a professor of dentistry at NYU. "Back in the day," there weren't many "dental labs" so the dentist was expected to make his or her own bridges, plates, crowns, and other dental appliances. Many dentists had extensive art backgrounds. My grandfather was an artist, preferring to sketch with charcoal, and in his spare time he would repair clocks and watches. He often cast his own replacement parts for those clocks and watches.

Mark