09/27/2025
George Washington was plagued with severe dental problems nearly his entire adult life. In a diary entry he wrote at age 24 he mentions paying a doctor to remove one of his teeth. By the time he was inaugurated as president, he only had one tooth remaining, and it was pulled a few years later.
So, Washington was forced to wear dentures. Although they were state-of-the-art technology at the time, the dentures were ill-fitting and extremely uncomfortable when worn. It is generally believed that Washington’s famous reticence and aversion to public speaking were due at least in part to his concern over how his missing teeth affected his appearance and to his discomfort when wearing the dentures.
By the way, the long-repeated story that Washington’s dentures were made of wood is false. His dentures were made of metal alloys, connected with springs, and to which cow, horse, and human teeth were affixed.
Another oft-repeated claim is that Washington’s dentures were made using teeth taken from his slaves. The only evidence which could possibly support that claim is a May 1784 entry in the Mount Vernon account book by Washington’s plantation manager (and distant cousin) Lund Washington for payment of 122 shillings to “Negroes for 9 Teeth on acct of the French Dentist Doctor Lemay.”
Beginning in 1781 Washington’s dentist was Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur, a Frenchman who had previously been the dentist of British general Henry Clinton and other British officers. Selling teeth to dentists for use as transplants was a common way poor people could earn money at the time, and Le Mayeur frequently placed notices in newspapers advertising his availability to perform tooth transplants and seeking “Persons who are willing to dispose of their Front Teeth.” (Interestingly, in his advertisements in Virginia, Le Mayeur specifically stated that he would not buy teeth from slaves.) For transplants, healthy teeth from living persons were necessary. And while such teeth could also be used in dentures, so could teeth from animals, from human corpses, or human teeth that had fallen out naturally. In other words, for use in dentures (as opposed to transplants) it wasn’t necessary that healthy teeth be extracted from a living person. There would have been no reason, therefore, to buy teeth this way for Washington's dentures.
We know that George Washington never received any tooth transplants. But were the nine teeth purchased by Lund Washington on Le Mayeur’s behalf to be used in Washington’s dentures? There is simply no way of knowing, although as is pointed out on the Mount Vernon website, the notation that the purchase was “on the account” of the dentist suggests that the dentist was the intended end user, not Washington. Presumably had the teeth been for Washington, the ledger would have simply indicated the item and amount of payment, as was done when Washington purchased other items from slaves on the plantation.
Likewise, whether the persons who Lund Washington paid for the teeth sold to Le Mayeur were slaves or free blacks cannot be determined from the ledger entry. And if the sellers were slaves, we have no way of knowing if they sold their teeth voluntarily (as many poor people in those days did) or whether they were forced to sell them (which a slaveowner would have been able to do).
The bottom line is that while it is possible that the nine teeth that Mount Vernon plantation manager Lund Washington bought from “Negroes” ended up in George Washington’s dentures, it is also possible (indeed more likely based on the way the transaction is recorded in the ledger) that they were for other patients of Dr. Le Mayeur or for his tooth inventory.
The image is Gilbert Stuart’s 1798 portrait of Washington.
