What are legends if not rumors with prestige? They are the truth, only magnified by the lens of reverence. And as they’re told and retold, sometimes those legends only bear a passing resemblance to the truth that inspired them.
This is the Forgotten History of Dr. Greenwood’s Teeth.
By the age of nine, John Greenwood knew what he wanted to be. Growing up in Boston when, as he put it, “nothing was talked of but war, liberty, or death,” he watched the British troops march up and down his street. He loved the sound of their fifes and begged his father, a carpenter and dentist, to buy him one.
Young John played every day, much to the enjoyment of Samuel Maverick, his father’s apprentice. The two bunked together in the family’s small home and the sounds of John’s fife filled their room.
In March, 1770, John’s world—and that of his fellow Americans—changed forever when Samuel was caught in an angry mob outside of the Customs House. Colonists began beating British soldiers sent to disperse the crowd with rocks and sticks and, in a panic, one of the soldiers opened fire.
When the gun smoke cleared on what became known as the Boston Massacre, Samuel lay dead.
Young John’s purpose in life was now clearer: To fight the British and help America win its independence. Five years later, following the Battle of Lexington, a 15-year-old John joined the 26th Massachusetts Regiment as a fifer.
On Christmas Night, 1776, he joined General George Washington in crossing the Delaware River to launch a surprise attack on the British in Trenton, New Jersey.
A few days later, Greenwood’s military enlistment ended, but he still yearned to help the Revolutionary cause so he became a privateer and helped attack British ships. He proved a successful pirate, but was captured several times before the war ended, and when it did, he returned home with his life at something of a crossroads.
The America he loved was free, and at 23 years old he was free to be anything he chose. But what? He had already been a fifer, a soldier, and a privateer, but he needed something to support a family.
He decided to follow his father into the dentistry business and began practicing in the young nation’s capital of New York City. As a boy, he thought the fife was his life’s calling, but as a young man, it proved to be dental innovation. He was one of the very first in the world to tell his patients to brush their teeth regularly to keep them healthy, and he invented the world’s first dental foot engine by using a spinning wheel. He used this new invention to revolutionize the manufacturing of dentures, using beeswax to make a mold of the patient’s jaw to fit them.
Dr. Greenwood’s work soon caught the attention of America’s new president, George Washington, who asked Greenwood to make him a pair of dentures for his notoriously bad teeth. Unlike most dentists of the time, Greenwood refused to pull teeth that simply caused pain, and he used Washington’s last remaining tooth to anchor dentures made of ivory.
Washington was so impressed with Greenwood’s work that he had him make three other pairs of dentures and, when America’s capital was moved to Philadelphia in 1792, he asked his dentist to make regular trips to see him. Greenwood did, and became known across the country as “President Washington’s personal dentist.” As a token of his appreciation, Washington gifted him with his last remaining tooth, which Greenwood kept as a cherished prize for the rest of his life.
The legend of Washington’s dentist and his unique practices only grew, as did the legend of his work. Cracks in the ivory of the president’s dentures appeared brown and, after he died in 1799, when people spoke of those dentures, they referred to them as “Greenwood’s teeth.”
Over the years, this morphed into “wood teeth,” and even though the president never wore wooden dentures, the legend of “George Washington’s wooden teeth” was born.