The quarter of an hour you have to fill awaiting your turn at the dentist should be good for a little light reading.

I switch on my iPad to catch up with the news but - maybe it's the antiseptic smell of the reception room, or the fretful child in the seat opposite, clinging to his mother like a barnacle - I cannot concentrate. Instead, I listen to the far-off whine of a drill, and reflect on the much under-rated role of the dentist in literature.

In my town alone, the fate of modern Scottish letters was aided immeasurably by a dentist, one Stanley Robertson. His surgery was at the other end of town from where I'm sitting. Parsonage House, which was built by an Episcopalian minister on Musselburgh High Street, is apparently where Walter Scott wrote several chapters of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. It is an elegant building, opposite Luca's the ice-cream emporium, and fronted by a walled garden. My husband recalls that when he was a child, he had to walk up its long path to the surgery, avoiding inquisitive goats that grazed on the lawn.

It was here in 1935 that Robertson, a great admirer of Hugh MacDiarmid, made him a pair of dentures for free. But he did more than that. When the writer and his wife needed somewhere to live away from the distractions of the city, he found a cottage for them in Longniddry, and paid their rent. That they hated the place, and its roving tramps, was not his fault. When they decamped for Brownsbank Cottage in South Lanarkshire, Robertson settled their debts. Thus, thanks to his deep pockets, a sliver of nationalist history, and modern Scottish poetry, was underwritten.

The annals of fiction are rich with works by and about doctors, but of dentists there is a dearth. One can understand that, when a GP or A&E consultant looks at a patient, they might feel the need to seek a deeper meaning to the world. As they probe or stitch or bandage, their imagination can, quite easily, take wing. But with a dentist, not only is the patient unable to talk, but the sight of a gaping mouth is presumably less conducive to philosophical reflection. One novel that addressed this directly is Joshua Ferris's droll To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, in which his dentist hero looks into one mouth after another, and finds in them an existential void.

Other than the Egyptian novelist, Alaa Al-Aswany, I can't think of any dentist-novelists. Perhaps the most brilliant novel to take place in a dentist's chair, however, is Gunter Grass's wry first-person account, Local Anaesthetic, published in 1969. In it, a disillusioned schoolteacher reflects on post-war German society and its burden of guilt while undergoing a course of dental work so extensive, it could stand as a metaphor for the building of the Berlin Wall. His reflections are interleaved with asides, such as "While the masticating surface of my first lower left molar is being ground down..." Anybody with a heart will find their toes curling in sympathy. But of course the bridge work he must endure is as nothing to the radical reshaping and restructuring his nation requires if it is to become healthy and flourish once more.

My turn with the dentist is drawing close, and nothing on the rack of well-thumbed magazines can hold my attention: National Geographic, Homes & Gardens, Marie Claire have all lost their allure, as has the pile of Golf Monthly. Golf, it seems, is the sport of choice for many in the dental fraternity, as it is of novelists, most famously John Updike and P G Wodehouse. When our dentist retired earlier this year, we gave him Everyman's anthology of Golf Stories in the hope it would console him over his handicap as well as pass the time. As he and his colleagues go about plugging holes, be it on the eighteenth at Muirfield or in our back teeth, maybe they could also consider filling the glaring cavity on the library shelf.