Paul Revere Dabbled in Dentistry, Among Other Things

Paul Revere was a man of many talents. Outside of his military accomplishments – for which he is well known, though there are many misconceptions surrounding this aspect of his life – Mr. Revere was also big into medicine. In fact, Paul Revere was the first known forensic dentist in American history.

In the early 1760s, a dental surgeon named John Baker arrived in the colonies. Revere, wanting more than what he was accustomed to, went under the tutorship of Baker, who taught him how to create and place false teeth in place of those real ones that had decayed. In essence, Revere learned how to place dentures. Revere became so good at dentistry that Baker ran an ad in the Boston Gazette in 1770, promoting Paul Revere as a dental assistant who could “fix [teeth] as well as any surgeon dentist who ever came from London, he fixes them in such a manner that they are not only an ornament but of real use in speaking and eating.”

But that wasn’t the height of Revere’s dental career. After the Revolutionary War broke out, Revere was called upon to locate the body of a colonial soldier who’d been killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. This soldier was the same Major General Joseph Warren who’d sent Revere on his famous “midnight ride” to Lexington earlier that year.

The British buried Warren in a mass grave, but naturally, his family wanted his body returned for a proper burial. However, by the time Warren’s family could get to the grave, the bodies had decayed to the point where they were impossible to tell apart—until, that is, Revere spotted a dental prosthetic he had made two years earlier, for one Mr. Joseph Warren.

According to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, this was the first instance in this country of an identification of a military service member using dental remains.

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