Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
We were at dinner with friends the other night and when their daughter found out that I was
the History Guy she asked a simple question: “What do you think of George Washington's wooden
teeth?” That's an interesting question because to tell you the truth I had never thought much
about George Washington's teeth, but when you research them they're really quite interesting.
George Washington's teeth tell us a lot about our first president, they were very important
to George Washington. His letters and journals are full of complaints about teeth pain and questions
about the care and maintenance of his many sets of dentures. His ledgers are full of expenses
for dental care. His false teeth affected his personality, it affected the way he interacted
with the public, at one point it might have even affected the Revolutionary War. And they raised a
thorny question about the nature of America's most famous founding father. And really, how
often do you really get a chance to talk about the interesting subject of the history of Dentistry.
There is some archaeological evidence that the practice of Dentistry might go all the
way back to the Stone Age, but the American Dental Association sees a Sumerian tablet from 5000 BC,
referencing tooth worms, as the beginning of Dentistry. The tomb of Hesyre, an Egyptian
scribe from around 2600 BC, has inscribed on the wall that he was the greatest among those
who worked with teeth, making him perhaps history's first professional dentist. The
practice of dental prosthetics goes all the way back to the Etruscans of northern Italy,
who as early as 700 BC, were replacing missing teeth by using an animal or human teeth that
was strung to the teeth next door using gold wire, and we see similar tooth replacement
going on in Egyptian mummies as early as 200 BC. And if you didn't know it, wooden
teeth were actually a thing, dentures carved of wood were first seen in Japan in the 1500s.
But the practice of Dentistry went through a revolution in the 1700s, and that was largely
due to a Frenchman named Pierre Fauchard, who was credited with creating the practice of modern
dentistry with the publication of his book, ‘The Surgical Dentist’ in 1728. Fauchard invented and
diagrammed many tools that dentists still use today, including the first known diagram of a
dental drill. And it was in the 18th century that dentures, and dental prosthetics, started
to be made out of ivory, sometimes whalebone but also from more exotic materials like elephant or
hippopotamus, and usually included real teeth sometimes taken from animals. Usually horses or
donkeys, or real human teeth. And how did they get those...well, we'll talk about that later.
George Washington was a famously fit, strong and athletic person, but he suffered from tooth pain
his entire life. His journal shows that his first tooth removal occurred at the young age of 24. His
journals and letters are full of complaints about teeth and teeth pain. It has been suggested that
his dental problems were caused by periodontal disease, which was the result of unfortunate
genetics and the absolute lack of dental hygiene practices in the 18th century. And those conspired
to cost him his teeth one by one. By the time he was elected president in 1789, he had just
one natural tooth left, a lower bicuspid and even that had to be removed in 1796. He gave
it to his dentist who reportedly had it encased in glass, and put it at the end of his watch bob.
Washington's dentures had a profound effect upon him, his journals and letters are full of
complaints about pain and ill-fitting dentures, and an obsession with the maintenance, repair
and cost of those dentures. The pain impacted him his entire life, and might be part of the
reason that he was known to have a short temper. The dentures also impacted his ability to speak,
and create certain sounds with his tongue. And the ill-fitting devices with springs and hooks
would have been an embarrassment to someone who was concerned with decorum and appearance,
and it might be a partial explanation for why George Washington was so famously brief in his
public speaking. His second inaugural address, for example, is still the shortest in history,
at just 130 five words. We don't even know what George Washington actually looked like because
his dentures altered his appearance. He complained that they pushed out his lips and his adopted son,
George Washington Park Custis, described it as a marked change. In fact most of the
portraits that we have of George Washington show a face that is distorted by dentures,
none more obvious than the paintings done by Gilbert Stuart in the 1790s, upon which
the famous portrait on the $1 bill is based. His dentures so affected his appearance that in 2005,
all the remaining sets of George Washington's dentures were laser scanned as part of a project
to try to create more realistic sculptures of George Washington, to display at Mount
Vernon. And while they affected his appearance they also might have affected his personality,
and might be a big part of the reason that he was seen as being such a stern persona. I
mean this was a man who was known to enjoy dancing, but who rarely smiled because it
would show his tooth problems, and who had to avoid a hearty laugh because,
since the dentures were spring-loaded, they could literally shoot the dentures from his mouth.
And according to George Washington's Mount Vernon website, there was at least one
point where Washington's bad teeth might have impacted the Revolutionary War. A packet of the
correspondence was captured by the British and read by the British General Sir Henry Clinton,
and included in there was a personal note from Washington to his dentist, asking for
a set of dental tools, and that personal note convinced Clinton that the packet was real,
and that he could trust the information he got from the packet. But the military
correspondence in the packet implied that Washington, and the French General Rochambeau,
were planning to stay in the New York area and not move south against General
Cornwallis in Yorktown. And that might be part of the reason that Sir Henry Clinton
failed to reinforce or evacuate Cornwallis, in order to prevent the defeat at Yorktown.
But despite the legend, none of George Washington's many sets of dentures were
made out of wood. Wooden dentures might still have been in use in Japan in that era, but in
North America and Europe, dentures were almost exclusively made out of ivory and real teeth,
either animal or human teeth. And of course being wealthy, George Washington was able to afford the
very best kinds of dentures. But the problem with ivory teeth, and even used real teeth,
is that they did stain easily and could turn brown, and that might be the genesis of the
legend that George Washington's false teeth were made out of wood. But that finally leads us to the
difficult question, if dentures were being made out of human teeth, where did they get them? Well
the teeth were usually pulled from criminals, who were executed. They were sometimes taken
by grave robbers. Dentists at the time were known to pay people to give up their teeth,
an unsavory income for the destitute, and they were often pulled from the mouths of soldiers that
were killed in battle. So many were taken from the dead after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815,
that for many years thereafter in England, false teeth were referred to as Waterloo teeth. And as
for George Washington himself, we know from a letter that he preserved his own teeth as they
were pulled, and those might have been used in Washington's dentures. But perhaps most
disturbing is a notation in a ledger in 1784 by the person that was managing Mt. Vernon while
Washington was fighting the revolution that said, by cash, paid Negroes, for nine teeth.
And while it's hard to tell exactly what this notation is talking about, it implies
that George Washington possibly had teeth pulled from his own slaves, to use in his dentures. And
while we don't have proof that these teeth ever wound up in any of George Washington's dentures,
it's something that people really don't want to believe of the First President, of a man who
seemed to be a progressive, who for example, freed his own slaves upon his death. But the thing is,
pulling the teeth of slaves for your own dentures, would have been a perfectly acceptable practice
for a slave holder in the 18th century, and George Washington was still a creature of his era.
Thankfully today dentures are made out of porcelain and that frees us from the
moral quandary of where to collect our spare teeth. But George Washington's not
wooden teeth do teach us many lessons. They teach us that culture is part of history,
that the state of medicine can affect the affairs of State. They teaches that
things that we take for granted today were terrible pains in the past, and perhaps they
teach us that the people that we idolize, our heroes, are maybe not as perfect as we hoped,
and maybe more than we imagined, creatures of their time. For good and for ill. And of course,
they remind us to always brush and floss, lessons that should not be forgotten.
I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history, 5 to 10 minutes long. And if you did enjoy them please
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