The first President Washington (1732-1799)’s clenched, taciturn and resolute image was built on a pair of uncomfortable dentures.
American scholar Jeffrey Schwartz conducted a spectral analysis of Washington’s dentures and found that the dental trays were made of lead and gold. The upper teeth were mainly from the upper teeth of horses or donkeys, and the lower teeth The row of teeth actually mainly comes from the upper teeth in other people's mouths.
This denture is not practical. The surface of the lead trays was flat and could not cover the gums; the springs that connected the upper and lower trays and pressed them against the gums actually bent backwards - a normal conversation could cause the dentures to erupt.
Its purpose may be just to fill the mouth on important occasions to maintain personal image. In addition, it may also be used for basic daily communication. In terms of the basic functions of teeth: it is still possible to chew soft things, but forget about eating meat.
It looks like the workmanship and materials are terrible, but it is the best one Washington has ever had - a "mature model" built by his last full-time dentist, John Greenwood. denture.
Washington's best dentures
Washington's teeth have always been terrible due to his constant use of his teeth to pry open the shells of walnuts and enjoy their beloved walnut meat. Since his first tooth was extracted at the age of 24, seven full-time dentists have removed all his teeth. When Washington became president in 1789, only one lower left premolar remained in his mouth, but it was also removed that year.
Long-term missing teeth will cause the bone supporting the tooth roots to be absorbed, causing the jaw to collapse and drastically change its size and shape. When you finally want to wear dentures, there won't be enough jawbone to support them.
In the last ten years of his stay in Washington, John Greenwood made multiple sets of dentures for him. The original "technology-proof" dentures were riveted with gold rivets on carved hippopotamus teeth, and he drilled a large hole in them so that Washington's only remaining tooth could pass through the hole...
On December 12, 1798, Washington wrote to Greenwood, asking the dentist to correct it with a file, "otherwise it will push up the lip under the nose."
Washington's hippopotamus dentures. The dental tray is engraved with: "These are the teeth of the great Washington" and the dentist "J. Greenwood".
Washington relies heavily on this dentist. For the work of correcting the braces, Greenwood asked Washington to pay him an extra $5, which was equivalent to two months' salary of a corporal in the U.S. Army at the time. Dental care is never cheap, and materials such as "ivory," "gold," and "hippopotamus" are by no means accessible to the poor.
Rinse your mouth with human urine, twice a day
As far as the level of oral medical services is concerned, the founding fathers of the United States were born at the wrong time. In 700 BC, Etruscan craftsmen used gold wire to fix fallen human or animal teeth to make dentures. But until Washington's time, there was no major breakthrough in denture technology. Tooth extraction technology, oral hygiene, and how to maintain aesthetics were the main directions of oral medicine at that time.
In 700 BC, the fixed denture technology in northern Italy fixed the dentures on adjacent teeth and was only suitable for a few missing teeth. From the perspective of later generations, dental pioneers made many "heavy taste" mistakes in their main directions.
In order to pursue whitening, the Egyptian Pharaoh liked to make a porridge with talcum powder and wine vinegar and apply it on small wooden sticks to grind his teeth. After the fall of the Roman Empire and during the Renaissance, dentists who also worked as barbers sharpened teeth with files and coated them with a corrosive liquid containing nitric acid. These techniques all destroy the protective enamel layer on the tooth surface.
A slightly healthier method was invented by the ladies of the Roman Empire: gargling with human urine—yes, they believed it would whiten their teeth.
In the 18th century, this method was rediscovered and quickly became popular in Europe. Pierre Fouchard (1678-1761), known as the father of modern dentistry, once wrote a dental outline of more than 900 pages. He claimed that he "relieved great pain" for many people whose teeth were about to rot. , the method is to let them rinse their mouth twice a day - with their own fresh urine.
Fucha wrote: "Although the taste may not be pleasant, its efficacy is very obvious." Because urine contains natural ammonia, based on modern scientific explanation, this method is better than previous whitening methods. Techniques and wizardry for relieving toothache are much more scientific.
Many heads of state who possess the best resources like Washington live in pain in pre-modern times. By comparison, Washington was lucky to live before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Research on the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs shows that almost all pharaohs were tortured by dental disease. It was a disease of wealth, and only the Pharaohs could eat bread made from stone-ground flour. But unfortunately, flour contains a lot of sand and small stones, which wear away the enamel on your teeth. Pain ensues, but the world's earliest Egyptian dentists are only responsible for extracting teeth and will not install dentures for the Pharaoh. Egyptian religion believes that people cannot interfere with the human body while they are still alive.
Before the rise of modern science, dentists everywhere believed that tooth pain and damage were caused by "worms" in the gums. This theory means that replacing dentures will have no effect.
The dental disease of King Louis XIV of France (1638-1715) was very serious. There was a big hole in the recess of his left jaw. Part of the reason was that he was too wealthy and had too many sweets. After the geographical discovery, the price of sugar dropped significantly due to the mass production and trade of black slave plantations in the West Indies. Sugar was also reduced from the banquet of the nobles to the meal bowl of the poor. Tooth decay cuts across classes and creates a strong need for dental care.
However, only the upper class can use a slightly decent treatment method - the dentist DuBois inserted a thick, long, hard and heated metal rod into the Sun King's mouth to treat him. 14 cautery surgeries were performed.
At the age of 45, Queen Elizabeth finally agreed to have her teeth extracted because she could not sleep for several days due to toothache. After losing her molars, her face became sunken and she had to stuff muslin cloth in her mouth on important occasions to maintain her appearance.
Henry III, the Count of Anjou who pursued Elizabeth and later became the King of France, also suffered from missing teeth. He once stuck a piece of denture that looked like an animal bone into his gums, and then tied it to the adjacent teeth on both sides with a thread - the early craftsmanship was so crude that only very wealthy people could afford it. Precious metal teeth and ivory are only considered general materials. In 1735, Lord Hervey used Italian agate to make dentures, leading the trend.
In the early 18th century, Fauchard, a dentist in Paris, France, pioneered the technology of using copper wire springs to fix upper and lower dentures into sets. At this point, the prototype of modern dentures appeared. Washington's dentures are the product of this school of removable denture technology.
Of course, this technology has very high requirements for springs, and the risk of instability is always there. In December 2006, at the European Socialist Party Conference, British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott sprayed out his dentures while delivering a speech. The deputy prime minister said "my teeth" in panic, but was dumbfounded and didn't know how to smooth things over.
Because of the lack of strength of early dentures, until the Victorian period, if the upper class wearing dentures held a banquet, they had to take off their dentures in their bedrooms to eat secretly to avoid the embarrassment of formal occasions.
The problem doesn’t stop there. Dentures made of ivory or animal bones have no enamel layer and are very susceptible to decay. This not only means they need to be replaced constantly, but they are also often infected and can cause severe bad breath. . It is said that Washington’s dental trays turned black because they smelled so bad that they needed to be soaked in wine to soften them.
In 1771, anatomist John Hunter published the book "Natural history of the human teeth", which sorted out the material categories of dentures at that time. Including shells, ivory, bones, or dead man's teeth. This image is part of the illustration.
There are two materials for dentures, which can prevent severe decay to a certain extent. One is the ceramic dentures that appeared in the late 18th century. Alexis, a British dentist, has invented technology that allows for the creation of ceramic dentures in different colors and shapes, either individually or as a complete set.
Although ceramics are durable and easy to fix, they are easily broken; and due to the lack of matching dental cleaning tools, people's teeth are all black and yellow, regardless of whether they are rich or poor, and porcelain dentures are dazzlingly white.
The other kind is real human teeth. They often have disgusting origins.
Tomb Robbery, Waterloo and Les Miserables
It goes without saying that human teeth have advantages in color and strength, but they will become inactive when removed from the gums where they originally grew, and need to be replaced regularly. This not only means that there is a huge demand for human teeth, but also allows denture merchants to get acquainted with many powerful people. The upper class people who need to replace their dentures regularly are a stable source of customers.
The human teeth used for dentures were generally limited to the four incisors: the incisors were of better quality and easier to remove - whether from the mouth of a dead person or a living person, and there was no anesthesia at that time. A set of dentures requires about sixteen to twenty front teeth, which means that four or five people can supply one aristocratic master. Human teeth are therefore in short supply.
The downstream demand led to the upstream profession of tooth hunters (teeth hunters), who collect teeth from all possible places.
The teeth of the poor are an important source and are expensive. In 1781, an artificial tooth on Girard Street in London cost half a guinea (a guinea was slightly higher than a pound), and a human tooth cost four times that.
A row of lower-quality human teeth was priced at a high price of 31 pounds 10 shillings - about the total income of a farmer for three years. The income earned by the poor from selling teeth can be used for a period of time. Fantine in "Les Misérables" is an even more unfortunate example, selling her teeth as well as her body.
Still from "Les Misérables", Fantine's teeth were pulled out
This 1787 work by British illustrator Thomas Rowlandson depicts a typical scene of poor people selling their teeth. The swarthy chimneyman sitting on the sofa in the middle is about to have his teeth pulled out, while the lady in yellow on the left is about to receive a transplant.
Dentures only need to be replaced regularly, but single tooth transplantation is very risky. Issues such as rejection and bacterial infection had no corresponding concepts at the time. Dental providers do not do health exams and do not perform sterilization before surgery. The long-term success rate of such surgeries is extremely low, and dental historians have argued that such surgeries are more likely to spread syphilis than solve the patient's oral problems.
Tooth hunters also extract teeth from unknown corpses. The source of the corpse was either the execution ground, or the body was stolen from a grave.
Astley Cooper was a famous surgeon in London in the early 19th century. He purchased corpses from a group of grave robbers. The book "The Life and Stories of Astley Cooper" written by his nephew stated: "The income from the sale of teeth alone is enough to match the risks and risks of corpse robbing and grave digging." The troubles are worth it."
But the number of corpse teeth obtained by these "conventional means" is still too small. The real gold mine of teeth is in the battlefield. Only when a large number of young and healthy soldiers died in battle could there be a continuous supply of teeth. "The Life and Deeds of Astley Cooper" quoted a tooth hunter as saying: "As long as there is a war, I am not afraid of losing teeth; as soon as someone falls, I will take the teeth out immediately", "The speed at which I extract teeth, It's almost as fast as knocking them down."
On the night of June 18, 1815, after 23 years of war, the French army suffered a complete defeat at Waterloo, leaving 50,000 dead and wounded on the battlefield. The Tooth Hunters reveled. Under the protection of the night, they skillfully opened the deceased's mouth and used strong pliers to pull out countless front teeth.
Many of the teeth were packed into barrels and shipped overseas. Among them, John Greenwood, a dentist in Washington, used wine oak barrels as containers and brought a bucket full of human teeth back to the United States. As long as Washington lived a few more years, he could get cheaper teeth. The same unfortunate person is Fantine in "Les Misérables". She sold her teeth around 1823 and encountered a bear market with enough teeth. If it had been sold ten years earlier, it might have been sold at a better price.
How many teeth do you have? There is a proper term "Waterloo teeth" in English to refer to the teeth of fallen soldiers who saved an entire generation of Europeans and Americans.
The most widely circulated photo of Waterloo teeth.
The teeth have also entered pop culture. The niche rock band Schnauser released an album called "Where Business Meets Fashion", the ninth song of which is "Waterloo Teeth". ?
Album cover of the Schnauser band
The West in the 19th century was by no means peaceful. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War broke out between Britain, France and Russia. The American Civil War was the first time that all-out war was put into practice. Due to the extremely high death toll, it gave back its teeth to Europe.
Dentures that Saved the World
Beginning in the mid-19th century, most innovations in dentistry originated in the United States.
Dentists have known for a long time that if the denture trays fit perfectly with the mouth and there is no air between them, the suction force will firmly hold the dentures in place, so there is no need for springs. However, the bottleneck that could not be broken due to materials and craftsmanship was solved by the Americans.
In 1844, American hardware merchant and inventor Charlie Goodyear announced a new type of vulcanized rubber. In addition to being quickly applied to tires, it can also be molded into comfortable dental trays at a low price. Goodyear made a fortune from this patent, but was murdered for his money. In order to commemorate him, a tire company was named after him. The Chinese translation is Xindaya's "Goodyear" and it became a century-old store in the industry.
However, in order to be extremely thin and light, the upper class is still unwilling to use slightly thicker rubber dental trays, Churchill is an example.
Churchill’s famous tongue-biting sound came from his dentures. He suffered from dental problems after adolescence. In his 20s, he lost all his front teeth and his speech was leaky. But under the government and political system, speaking skills are so important to politicians. According to a spokesman for the museum that later collected Churchill's dentures, "Ever since Churchill came of age, he has been worried about losing his speech ability."
The solution was to get dentures. Churchill's original dentures were made of hard rubber and were very uncomfortable to wear. Successive sets of dentures were so neglected in terms of user experience that Churchill repeatedly pried the dentures out of his mouth with his hands and threw them against the wall.
When Churchill became prime minister of the wartime coalition government, he approached the most famous dentist in Britain at the time, Wilfred Fahey. Fish carefully designed a model for him and made many dentures with gold alloy trays based on it. Churchill was very satisfied with this.
“I have nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat to devote my whole life to.” Many of Churchill’s speeches that boosted the morale of British soldiers and civilians during the war were attributed to this pair of dentures. Narcissistic Brits call it "the denture that saves the world."
From 1952 to 1954, at the end of his second term, Churchill wrote many letters to express his gratitude to Dr. Fashe, and even proposed to grant the latter a knighthood. He once wrote: "I have the great honor to recommend you for this well-deserved honor. Enclosed is a pair of dentures. I would be very grateful if you could tighten them a little more. The other pairs have always been The work is in perfect condition.”
On January 19, 2011, three years ago today, Churchill’s gold-encrusted dentures were sold in Norfolk, England, for ￡15,200 (approximately RMB 160,880 at the time). auction.
Thankfully, we live in the 21st century. Dental treatment is still not cheap, but having attractive white teeth is much easier than before.