Wednesday, March 5, 2025

The surprising thing George Washington's dentures were made from

George Washington's dentures were made from, among other things, hippo tusks.

Famous Figures

W hen forming a mental picture of George Washington, many of us likely flip through the brain rolodex to recall a portrait of the founding father staring back at viewers in a stately manner or calmly seated before the Continental Congress. However, these cool-as-a-cucumber depictions marked a stark contrast to reality, as Washington was often in pain from the tooth problems he endured for most of his adult years.

Whether due to childhood neglect, poor diet, or genetics, Washington had his first tooth pulled at age 24 and spent the rest of his life trying to play catch-up with fastidious attention to oral health. It wound up being a losing battle, as he was saving his pulled teeth for use in dentures by his early 50s. While real human teeth were a prize component of dentures, Washington accepted sets that included animal teeth as well as lead-tin, copper, and silver alloys — though notably not wood, as is often erroneously reported. By the time of his inauguration in 1789, the first U.S. president was wearing a customized set of dentures, built by New York dentist John Greenwood, that featured hippopotamus ivory and an array of gold wire springs and brass screws to hold its human teeth in place.

Unfortunately, the access to cutting-edge dental technology didn't translate to an improved quality of life for Washington, who dashed off a series of letters to his dentist in later years that complained of the discomfort and bulging caused by his dentures. Still, the general seemed to realize there was little that could be done in this longtime war of attrition within his mouth, and when his final real tooth needed to be pulled in 1796, he gifted it to Dr. Greenwood.

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By the Numbers

Average lifespan (in years) of a denture

7-10

Americans who wore dentures as of 2020

41 million

Did you know?

Paul Revere was a part-time dentist.

Remembered by students nowadays for his midnight ride at the onset of the American Revolution, Paul Revere was largely known to fellow citizens of Massachusetts in the late 18th and early 19th centuries for his trade as a silversmith. However, when the end of the French and Indian War ignited an economic depression in the 1760s, the famed patriot took on an array of side hustles that included stints as a copperplate engraver, an illustrator, and even a dentist. Having learned the tools of the trade from a local practitioner named John Baker, Revere placed a pair of advertisements for his services in the Boston-Gazette, the second of which boasted of his record of having "fixt some hundreds of teeth." Although Revere was seemingly finished with dentistry around the time the war commenced, his handiwork proved helpful in the aftermath of the June 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill. Identifying one body as that of Joseph Warren due to the walrus tooth and wire he had inserted, Revere helped ensure the beloved local leader had a proper burial, and as such added one more title to his already expansive résumé: the country's first forensic dentist.