奴隶主的爱心,以及华盛顿的牙医
天柏 发表于 2012-3-22 11:43 static/image/common/back.gif华盛顿是伟人，但远非圣人。1782年维吉尼亚州即修改法律允许释放奴隶，他等了17年死后才做。没有必要为他 ...
奴隶主的行为方式,有爱惜财物,顾惜宠物的一面,而这些爱惜与顾惜是真实的,单列出来也可以跟现代观念里,平等的人格之间的对于彼此的爱心,相混淆.
但是这个关系是人与物,即使这个物是财物或宠物,仍然是物.而这种类型的关系,就难免会有些不概不尬,容易触动现代人普世而敏感的小心灵的,有时会小有震撼的细节.
比如说,在这个刊载于PBS的有关华盛顿的奴隶之生活状况的研究,提到饱受牙病折磨的老主人,曾经让牙医把奴隶的好牙拔下来,给自己植牙,而给奴隶的补偿费是市场价格的三分之一.
Slaves of the eighteenth century sometimes turned to the perfectly acceptable means of making money by selling their teeth to dentists. Since at least the end of the Middle Ages, poor people had often sold their teeth for use in both dentures and in tooth-transplant operations for those wealthy enough to afford the procedures. Sometimes the teeth were perfectly healthy; others were diseased and needed to be pulled anyway. In 1780 a French dentist named Jean Pierre Le Moyer (also called Le Mayeaur, Le Mayeur, and Joseph Lemaire) came to America, possibly as a naval surgeon with the French forces commanded by the Comte de Rochambeau, and over the next decade treated patients in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Alexandria, and Richmond. He seems to have had an extensive practice in tooth transplants, but the results of the procedure were short-lived, usually less than one or two years. Transplantable teeth were hard to come by, and in 1783 Le Moyer even went so far as to advertise in the New York papers for "persons disposed to sell their front teeth, or any of them," netting the donor two guineas (forty-two shillings) per tooth. In Richmond, he offered anyone but slaves a similar amount for their front teeth. Technical problems made it impossible to transplant molars, so the operation was probably useful primarily for cosmetic reasons. Le Moyer first treated George Washington's teeth at his military headquarters in 1783.
The following year, in May of 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 ," almost certainly Le Moyer. Over the next four years, the dentist was a frequent and apparently favorite guest on the plantation. Whether the Mount Vernon slaves sold their teeth to the dentist for any patient who needed them or specifically for George Washington is unknown, although Washington's payment suggests that they were for his own use. 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.
全文在这里:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/fr ... on/video/lives.html
这厮被放血死掉活该 本帖最后由 肖羽 于 2012-3-22 18:03 编辑
考研某年的英语阅读里有一篇关于华盛顿拔牙，杰弗逊私生子的故事，
可惜没樱桃树传播广泛
不知樱桃树是哪个X货想出来的
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正史上说，华落樱永远神情冷峻不苟言笑，就是因为一口烂牙
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