Washington [441]
With their wiring, pins, and rough edges, such dentures rubbed painfully against the gums, forcing dentists to prescribe soothing ointments or opiate-based powders to alleviate discomfort. With or without the dentures, Washington had to endure constant misery. He spent Sunday, January 17, 1790, at home in excruciating tooth pain, writing in his diary the next day, “Still indisposed with an aching tooth and swelled and inflamed gum.”1 Later in the year Tobias Lear bought laudanum for Washington’s household account, which was likely used to relieve the tortured presidential mouth. Washington could also have derived opiates from poppies grown at Mount Vernon.
One of Greenwood’s attractions for Washington must have been his steadfast discretion, for Washington demanded absolute secrecy and could not afford a blabbermouth dentist. After he moved to Philadelphia, he and Greenwood swapped letters in cloak-and-dagger style; Washington entrusted dental letters to secret intermediaries, afraid to commit them to the mails. Writing to Greenwood in February 1791 about some needed adjustments of his dentures, Washington maintained the tone of hugger-mugger. “Your letter of the 6th and the box which accompanied it came safe to hand,” he wrote enigmatically. “The contents of the latter were perfectly agreeable to me and will . . . answer the end proposed very well.”2 Greenwood confessed to Washington that there were limits to what he could accomplish via long distance, noting that “it is difficult to do these things without being on the spot,” and he promised to travel to Philadelphia to make needed alterations.3
During his two terms Washington chomped his way through several pairs of dentures, and his letters to Greenwood explain why they so often wore out. Bars holding the teeth together were either too wide on the side or too long in the front, leading Washington to complain that they “bulge my lips out in such a manner as to make them appear considerably swelled.”4 To relieve this discomfort, he often filed down the dentures but ended up loosening the teeth in the process. So embarrassed was he by the way the dentures distorted his facial appearance that he pleaded with Greenwood to refrain from anything that “will in the least degree force the lips out more than [they] now do, as it does this too much already.”5 In the portrait of Washington done by Christian Güllager in 1789, Washington’s lower lip juts out rather grotesquely. Apparently the president undertook some amateur dentistry of his own, telling Greenwood to send a foot of spiral spring and two feet of gold wire that he could shape himself.
Washington must have been very fond of Greenwood, for when his last tooth was pulled in 1796, he allowed Greenwood to retain this valuable souvenir, which the dentist inserted into a little glass locket on his watch fob. Without this tooth to serve as an anchor, keeping new dentures in place became an ordeal. Washington never overcame his dental tribulations and as late as December 1798 still protested that his new set “shoots beyond the gums” and “forces the lip out just under the nose.”6 Usually tightfisted, he gave Greenwood carte blanche to spend whatever it took to solve the problem. “I am willing and ready to pay whatever you may charge me,” he wrote in some despair.7
If Washington was self-conscious about smiling in later years, it may also have been because his dentures grew discolored. When he sent Greenwood a pair of dentures for repair in December 1798, the dentist noted that they had turned “very black,” either because Washington had soaked them in port wine or because he drank too much of it. Greenwood gave Washington a terse lesson in denture care: “I advise you to either take them out after dinner and put them in clean water and put in another set or clean them with a brush and some chalk scraped fine.”8 For someone who took inordinate pride in his appearance, the highly visible dentures must have been mortifying, especially since public speaking and socializing were constant,