There’s A Museum For It
YOU’LL NEVER BE HAPPIER TO visit your dentist than after you’ve seen the new Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore, where the artifacts of what once passed for dental technology will be unflinchingly displayed.
The new $5.8 million museum, with its 40,000-piece collection, is associated with the University of Maryland’s Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, founded in 1840 as the world’s first dental college. It is scheduled to open next April. The idea for a museum was suggested by Dr. Malvin Ring, author of the accompanying article, who toured European dental museums in 1984 and decided that America should have one of its own. Dr. Harris, for whom the museum is named, is a ninety-two-year-old pediatric dentist from Detroit who began practicing dentistry in the mid-1920s, when he sometimes saw fourteen-year-old patients in need of, permanent dentures.
Only about a thousand items from the museum’s collection will be on regular display, but these will include some 1,000- to 1,300-year-old Mayan teeth with jade inlays; seventeenth-century extraction instruments known as “pelicans” and “elevators”; ancient and modern toothbrushes; the tiny denture of Lavinia Warren, wife of the famed nineteenth-century midget Tom Thumb; and state-of-the-art equipment.
Set apart in their own display case will be a collection of elegant picks, scrapers, sealers, and mirrors made in 1846 for Sir Edwin Saunders to use exclusively on Queen Victoria. The museum’s director, Dr. Ben Z. Swanson, Jr., a retired Air Force colonel and dentist, paid $24,000 for them in a transatlantic auction in August 1994. The instruments’ handles are decorated with crowns as well as roses, thistles, and shamrocks (for England, Scotland, and Ireland, respectively). Sir Edwin, who helped establish Britain’s first dental school and opened its first dental clinic for the poor, was also the first dentist knighted.
However special the queen’s instruments may be, the museum’s main attraction is George Washington’s dentures, created for him in 1796 by John Greenwood, perhaps America’s greatest eighteenth-century dentist. Washington suffered from periodontal disease and caries from early youth, and when he became President he had only one remaining tooth, a lower left bicuspid. By 1796 even that was gone. Four of his dentures are known to survive. None are made of wood; they all contain human, animal, or ivory teeth, sometimes fastened with wooden pegs. Washington probably found them uncomfortable and wore them more for looks than for eating.
THE ONES GIVEN TO THE UNI versity of Maryland by a Greenwood descendant were by far the best set; unfortunately, they were stolen in June 1981 while on loan to the Smithsonian Institution. The lower denture was found in a Smithsonian storeroom in August 1982, but the upper has never been recovered and may well have been melted down for its gold palate. The dentures were not insured, and the university has never received any compensation for the theft, although the Smithsonian is lending some exceptional artifacts to the new dental museum. These will include the entire office of Greene V. Black of Jacksonville, Illinois, sometimes called the father of modern American dentistry, as it existed at his death in 1915.
Even without its upper portion, the Baltimore remnant of Washington’s dentures is a powerfully evocative relic. One benefactor who donated $500,000 specifically asked for the honor of holding it just before finalizing his pledge.
Dr. Swanson is negotiating with the owners of the other surviving Washington dentures—the New York Academy of Medicine, the Royal London Hospital Dental School, and the museum at Washington’s home, Mount Vernon—to arrange for a reunion of all four sets (of which only Mount Vernon’s has both upper and lower dentures) at the National Museum of Dentistry’s opening. It would be the first time the Founding Dentures have smiled at one another since Washington wore them.
