Washington [304]
By 1781 Washington had partial dentures made with a bone and ivory framework, secured to natural teeth and held together by a primitive mesh of wires. Before marching south to Yorktown, he wrote with some urgency to Dr. Baker, asking for “a pair of pincers to fasten the wire of my teeth” and also “one of your scrapers, as my teeth stand in need of cleaning.” 3 At this point Washington had a small arsenal of devices to keep his aching mouth in working order. In a secret, locked drawer of his desk at Mount Vernon, he preserved a pair of pulled teeth and not long before the Newburgh mutiny asked Lund to wrap them up carefully and send them along. His objective was to have Dr. Baker insert them into a partial bridge; the dentist was to send him plaster of paris or some other powder to create a model of his mouth. When this letter was intercepted by the British, it occasioned some sadistic merriment while leaving poor Washington in considerable distress. The episode could only have strengthened his self-consciousness about his dental problems.
As it turned out, deliverance lay at hand in the person of an eminent French dentist, Dr. Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur, who had worked in occupied New York, treating Sir Henry Clinton and other British generals. One day a British officer made a cutting remark about the French alliance with America, and the dentist rushed indignantly to his country’s defense, ending the honeymoon with the British. Having established his patriotic credentials, Dr. Le Mayeur passed over to the American side, where his reputation preceded him. Washington was eager to consult the Frenchman, “of whose skill much has been said,” but he wanted the matter treated with utmost discretion, telling his intermediary categorically that “I would not wish that this matter should be made a parade of.”4 Thorough in all things, Washington demanded “a private investigation of this man’s character and knowledge of his profession” before he opened up his mouth to his ministrations.5
In June 1783, when Washington consulted the urbane Le Mayeur in confidence at Newburgh, he handled their relationship as furtively as if he were meeting a master spy. (He seemed mystified by the spelling of the Frenchman’s name, calling him La Moyuer at one point, as if he dared not check the spelling with a potentially indiscreet third party.) Evidently, the dentist agreed to craft a pair of partial dentures. Washington responded with an elliptical letter that resorted to euphemisms, never mentioning such explosive words as dental or dentures in case unfriendly eyes stumbled upon it. “The valise arrived safe, as did the three articles which accompanied your card,” Washington wrote cryptically. “. . . The small matters [his teeth?] which were expected from Virginia are not yet received, and it is to be feared will never be found.”6
Always a tough, leery customer, Washington was skeptical about claims made for transplanted teeth. The following year, when Le Mayeur performed a successful transplant upon Richard Varick, it made a convert of Washington. According to Mary Thompson, Washington bought nine teeth in 1784 from certain nameless “Negroes” for thirteen shillings apiece.7 Whether he wanted the teeth implanted directly in his mouth or incorporated into dentures, we cannot say. However ghoulish this trade sounds to modern readers, it was then standard practice for rich people to purchase teeth from the poor. In his advertisements, Dr. Le Mayeur offered to buy teeth from willing vendors and bid “three guineas for good front teeth from anyone but slaves.”8 This suggests a stigma among white people about having slaves’ teeth. We can deduce that Washington’s dental transplant miscarried, since by the time of his presidential inauguration in 1789, he had only a single working tooth remaining.
ON APRIL 18 , 1783 , Washington announced the cessation of hostilities between America and Great Britain and seemed to pinch himself with wonder as he evoked “the almost infinite variety of scenes