Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

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James Madison Zachary with his dental instruments

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  • This tintype photograph shows James Madison Zachary (1842–1898) with his dental instruments. Zachary began practicing dentistry in the 1860s after the Civil War. After he died in 1898, his second daughter Daisy Zachary McGuire (1880-1980) began a dental apprenticeship in Anderson, South Carolina and after two years had her own itinerant practice. When the newly formed NC Dental Board required her to have a license, she became the first licensed female dentist in North Carolina when she graduated in 1908 from Southern Dental College in Atlanta.