September 8, 2012

"In 1784, five years before he became president of the United States, George Washington, 52, was nearly toothless. So he hired a dentist to transplant nine teeth into his jaw—having extracted them from the mouths of his slaves."

—

The sorry legacy of the founders

(via so-treu)

they used slaves for spare body parts.

(via theinebriatedfangirl)

Exploitation of Black bodies assure white people can eat. Literally.

(via bankuei)

In fifth grade I learned the mythology that he had wooden teeth, but had a fine porcelain set.

And now… there is this.

(via hamburgerjack)

“…1784, Washington paid several unnamed “Negroes,” presumably Mount Vernon slaves, 122 shillings for nine teeth, slightly less than one-third the going rate advertised in the papers, “on acct. of the French Dentis [sic} Doctr. Lemay [sic],” almost certainly Le Moyer. Over the next four years, the dentist was a frequent and apparently favorite guest on the plantation…Washington probably underwent the transplant procedure—“I confess I have been staggered in my belief in the efficacy of transplantion,” he told Richard Varick, his friend and wartime clerk, in 1784—and thus it may well be that some of the human teeth implanted to improve his appearance, or used to manufacture his dentures, came from his own slaves.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/video/lives.html

Because the “History from a Christian Perspective” textbooks I was given as a child absolutely idolized the founding fathers and told charmingly quirky stories about cherry trees and wooden teeth.

(via tashkil13)

This is haunting…

(via vidavivesinmi)

(via howtobeterrell)

11:55am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZvdmZyT02d6q

(Notes: 3,511)