Exactly 200 years ago any dentist with a few pounds to spare could buy fresh teeth by the barrel load. They were very handy for anyone in the business of manufacturing dentures and happily here was a sudden glut on the market. The cause of that glut was the Battle of Waterloo, the concluding conflict of the Napoleonic wars.
The Emperor Napoleon’s 72,000 French troops had faced the combined 68,000 strong British, Dutch, Belgian, and German army led by the Duke of Wellington, alongside some 45,000 late-arriving Prussians led by Field Marshall Blucher.
The site of the battle lies some 20 miles south of Brussels on the road to Paris. Tourists today can walk across ground which was once witness to the flying bullets and careering cannonballs. They can visit the farmhouses of Hougemont and La Haye Sainte, two buildings sitting between the opposing armies, each one the focus of vicious hand to hand fighting on that remarkable day in 1815.
Warterloo Day, the 18th June, was a day which would be celebrated in Britain for generations. The French had been at war almost incessantly for almost a quarter of a century; but by 10 pm on that long summer evening both the wars and Napoleon’s dream of resurrecting his recently interrupted career were over.
Dreams however were not the only thing broken on the field of Waterloo; people too had been shattered. The scene on the battlefield, only fully apparent at sunrise the following morning, was appalling: the French Emperor had lost 25,000 men. The Duke of Wellington’s mixed force had suffered 15,000 casualties and Blucher’s Prussians some 8,000. Viewed in the grey light of dawn the battlefield was indeed a dreadful sight.
Wellington famously remarked: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.”
The visible carnage was itself bad enough. But what was even more appalling was a fresh army which had appeared. An army of scavengers was now stripping dead soldiers – and some not so dead – of their valuables: coins, clothes, weapons and of course of their teeth. Nor were they alone: Army surgeons too joined in.
Before long cartloads of teeth were heading for the Channel ports. But how did exporters know there was a ready market for their grisly goods? The answer is that the trade was already well-established. Napoleon’s armies had been creating corpses for a long time before Waterloo.
Europe’s export trade in teeth had begun when one of George Washington’s dentists, John Greenwood, returned from a trip to Europe in 1805, bringing with him a barrel load of human teeth from one of Napoleon’s earlier battles.
Now the mountain of teeth flooding onto the London market was so vast that the name ‘Waterloo Teeth’ became synonymous with dentures.
The belief that the teeth going into one’s dentures had once belonged to a brave young soldier cut down in the prime of life had great commercial appeal. The truth however was often quite different: the teeth might just as easily have been torn from the gums of a corpse stolen from the local churchyard; or even from a murderer condemned to be hanged and then
dissected.
Money of course encouraged such deception. Thirty years before Waterloo the price being charged just for providing a single ivory tooth by one London dental practitioner, Paul Jullion of Gerrard Street, was ten shillings and sixpence – more than a labourer’s weekly wage; the cost was four times higher for supplying a human tooth. The charge for a complete upper denture made of human teeth was £31 and 10 shillings – several thousand pounds today.
Dentists would pay good money for good teeth, no questions asked. Despoiling the recently dead could be ‘a nice little earner’ and dentists indirectly encouraged the body snatching trade just as much as did surgeons seeking the means with which to practice and teach anatomy.
‘Resurrectionists’ like the infamous Burke and Hare did not however always wait for their sources to be dead. They murderously speeded up the normal arrangements by suffocating victims and selling their corpses. And they were not the only ones. Another nasty pair, John Bishop and James May, killed a 14 year old Italian boy, Carlo Ferrari, in London in 1831 and then offered the body for sale to anatomists for 12 guineas. May separately also tried to sell 12 of the boy’s teeth to
Newington dentist Thomas Mills. The dentist was offered the teeth for just one guinea, but he declined to buy them and was a witness at the subsequent murder trial. Bishop and May were hanged in December 1831, though not before Bishop revealed that he had dug up and sold up to 1,000 bodies.
There were, however, already some alternatives to human teeth: the first porcelain teeth had been made by Italian dentist Guiseppangelo Fonzi in Paris as early as 1808. But even compared to the high cost of human teeth such ‘mineral teeth’ were very expensive: 150 guineas being quoted for a full set as late as 1845.
Despite the existence of a viable alternative the demand for ‘Waterloo teeth’ continued well into the second half of the 19th century. Their price even fell, firstly as a result of the Crimean War in the 1850s. In the following decade supplies increased
further, reversing the export trade of 50 years earlier due to the increasingly mechanised slaughter of the America’s Civil War. Battles such as Bull Run and Gettysburg led to over half a million deaths, and to millions of American teeth being exported from the USA to Europe.
Neither the Emperor Napoleon nor the Duke of Wellington lived to benefit from such exports from the USA; Napoleon had died in exile on St Helena in 1821 at the age of 52, still with all but four of his own teeth. Wellington lived until 1852, but despite the loss of several teeth the Duke never expressed a wish to acquire a set of Waterloo teeth for himself.