False Teeth Day

What the day is

False Teeth Day is observed on March 9. The history of dentures is grimmer and more interesting than the jokes suggest.

Origin and background

Washington's teeth were never wooden. Surviving sets are made from hippopotamus and elephant ivory, animal teeth, human teeth and metal fittings, and the wooden appearance came from ivory staining and cracking with age into a grain-like pattern. The part usually left out of the correction is that his own ledgers record payments for teeth purchased from enslaved people at Mount Vernon, and historians accept that human teeth from that source were used in his dentures.

Human teeth were a commodity more generally. After the battle of Waterloo in 1815, teeth pulled from the mouths of young dead soldiers were collected and sold across Europe for denture work, and the term Waterloo teeth remained in use for decades afterward as a selling point, because teeth from healthy young men were better than those available from any other source.

What changed everything was cheap material. Vulcanite, hardened rubber, arrived in the 1850s and made a fitted denture base affordable to ordinary people for the first time. The patent was enforced ferociously, and the enforcement produced one of dentistry's stranger episodes when the agent pursuing infringing dentists was shot dead by one of them in 1879. Acrylic resin replaced vulcanite from the 1930s and remains standard.

Tooth loss has fallen dramatically in wealthy countries with fluoridation and routine dentistry, though it remains strongly patterned by income. Dentures also need periodic relining, because the jawbone beneath resorbs once teeth are gone and a set that fitted well will loosen over years.

How to take part

• Correct the wooden teeth story, including the part that follows it.
• Clean dentures over a basin of water, which saves a great many breakages.
• Take them out overnight unless advised otherwise, and keep them moist.
• Get a loose set relined rather than relying on adhesive.
• Look up Waterloo teeth, which is a genuinely unsettling piece of history.