AT A TIME when dental health was not really understood and tooth decay was prevalent, there was a constant demand for good-quality dentures. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries people dreaded losing their teeth: the toothless had sunken cheeks and looked old before their time, and without teeth it was hard to speak intelligibly. In the upper ranks of society, the toothless tended to keep their mouths shut rather than reveal their naked gums. For those who could afford it, the answer was a set of false teeth, but dentures rarely fitted, they looked nothing like the real thing and in most cases were not secure enough to risk eating with. Some early sets of teeth were carved from a single piece of ivory or bone, while in the more sophisticated designs artificial teeth were riveted to a plate made of ox bone or hippo ivory. The biggest drawback of all was that the lack of enamel on bone and ivory meant decay soon set in. The result was inevitable: a rotten taste in the mouth and evil-smelling breath. The fashion for fans was prompted by the all too common need to hide bad teeth and stinking breath. Dentures made from human teeth were much better.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, patients with plenty of money but very few teeth were prepared to pay enormous sums for a good set of dentures, and the best had real human teeth at the front. Sometimes the poor could be persuaded to part with good teeth, but people had to be desperate to sell their own teeth. The dead, however, did not need persuading. For the discerning patient, teeth from the battlefield were the best. It was not always what they actually got. Many second-hand teeth came from mortuaries, the dissecting room and the gallows. The biggest purveyors of teeth were the ‘resurrectionists’ who stole corpses to sell to medical schools; teeth were one of the extra perks of the job. Even if they dug up a body too far gone for the anatomy classroom, they could still pocket a tidy sum by selling the teeth.
Date of manufacture:
c. 1820
Location:
Museum for Health Care, Kingston, Canada
Astley Cooper, the most popular surgeon in London in the early nineteenth century, kept a whole band of resurrectionists in business. He bought the bodies, but the teeth went elsewhere. According to his nephew Bransby Cooper, author of The Life of Astley Cooper, the bodysnatchers did not always bother to take the body. When graves were disturbed it was not always to obtain possession of the entire body: the teeth alone at this time offered sufficient remuneration for the trouble and risk incurred in such undertakings. Every dentist in London would at this time purchase teeth from these men.
Dentists needed a steady supply of human teeth, and prices were phenomenal. In 1781, Paul Jullion of Gerrard Street in London was charging 2 guineas for a single human tooth. A row of real teeth fetched an astronomical £31 10s. (£2,000 in modern values), and one fellow returned from Waterloo with a box of teeth and jaw-bones valued at £100 (about £3,400 today).
Demand for second-hand incisors usually far outstripped supply, but wars helped make up the shortfall. In the gloom as night fell over the battlefields, after the petty thieves came the final act of desecration: tooth hunters deftly pulled and pocketed any intact front teeth. Tooth hunters followed the armies, moving in as soon as the living had left the field. ‘Only let there be a battle and there will be no want of teeth; I’ll draw them as fast as the men are knocked down,’ says one such hunter in The Life of Astley Cooper.
Taking teeth from the dead to replace those lost by the living was therefore nothing new, but after Waterloo the magnitude of it was different – it was done on a truly industrial scale. The fact that these teeth came from dead soldiers did not put clients off: it was seen as a very positive selling point. Better to have teeth from a relatively fit and healthy young man killed by a cannonball or sabre than incisors plucked from the jaws of a disease-riddled corpse decaying in the grave or from a hanged man left dangling way too long on the gibbet. Having been plundered from the battlefield, most of these teeth made their way back to Britain, the country best able to afford the new top-quality dentures which would incorporate them.
These then became known as ‘Waterloo teeth’ and were often worn with a great deal of pride. Worn as something like trophies by elderly dandies, the nationality of the teeth in question was actually far from certain, and the gullible patriot was as likely to be sporting a countryman’s teeth as those of the vanquished foe.
The term ‘Waterloo teeth’ quickly came to apply to any set of dentures made from young and healthy teeth taken from a Napoleonic battlefield and continued as a term well on into the nineteenth century, becoming less and less historically accurate as time went on. Although wholly artificial teeth began to take over from the 1840s onwards, as late as the 1860s human teeth obtained from the battlefields of the American Civil War were being shipped to Europe for sale.