Battle of Waterloo: Teeth taken from the dead were worn with pride amid patriotic fervour over Wellington's victory – Susan Morrison

Replacement teeth were not the only grisly uses of the remains of those who fell at Waterloo

The day after the Battle of Waterloo was a busy one. The battlefield buzzed with human scavengers as they stalked through the clouds of flies swirling around more than 50,000 dead men, including the fallen of Scottish regiments such as the Royal Scots Greys, the Highland Light Infantry and the Black Watch. They didn’t overlook the tens of thousands more who lay wounded and alone. Money was to be made from bloodied armour, discarded swords, fancy officers uniforms, and teeth. These grisly tooth fairies had markets and mouths to fill.

Rotten teeth, their removal and replacement, has a long and royal tradition in Scotland. When James IV of Scotland, a king who took up hobbies the way his brother-in-law Henry burned through wives, paid to have a troublesome tooth removed, he became so fascinated by the process he ordered his own set of pinchers (pliers). In 1511, he actually whipped out two teeth from one of his own courtiers. Fortunately, current royal interests lie in town planning and architecture. On the plus side, James went on to grant a charter to the barbers and surgeons of Edinburgh in 1505, one of the first in the world.

By the Age of Enlightenment, Scotland's sugar-damaged choppers were being replaced by wallies made from porcelain, ivory and carved animal teeth. Some sets and replacements were made from human teeth. No one could be too sure where they came from. Some were a tad squeamish about flashing the gnashers of some grave-robbed corpse.

A French dentist shows an example of his false teeth in an picture from 1811 (Artist Thomas Rowlandson/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

Tooth transplants

Fortunately East Kilbride-born pioneering surgeon John Hunter was on the case. His revolutionary work on blood vessels led him to believe that it would be possible to transplant a healthy tooth into a human mouth. Embedding false ‘teeth’ wasn’t new. Skulls thousands of years old have been found with gold and silver teeth in their jaws, even shells in place of molars.

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French cuirassiers charge a British square during the Battle of Waterloo (Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

But Hunter believed that living teeth from donors could be embedded in the jaw. In the late 1770s, he started by transplanting a tooth into the comb of a cockerel. Hunter had observed that the coxcomb was rich in blood vessels. Fertile soil for tooth planting. In the Hunterian museum in London, there is just such a comb, with a human tooth sticking out of it. Hunter declared the experiment a great success. The tooth, he said, showed signs of embedding and the blood vessels signs of growth. Modern scientists believe that Hunter simply walloped the tooth in hard, and that’s what kept it in place whilst the blood vessels grew around it like ivy.

No matter. Here was the cockerel’s comb and there was an apparently living human tooth. The craze for tooth transplanting was on. The poor lined up to sell their healthy incisors and the rich paid to replace their rotting fangs. It sometimes worked, and probably for the same reason as the coxcomb. The donor teeth were hammered in, and some stayed in place for a few years, but they were prone to disease.

Extraction and implanting were done entirely free of such modern fripperies as anaesthetic or pain relief. Not surprisingly, many decided a swift one-off operation was a better solution. Get them all out, and get the false teeth in, fitted by a specialist with a fancy new title. In 1927, dental historian Lillian Lindsay believed she had discovered the first use of the word ‘dentist’ in the UK. The Edinburgh Chronicle of 1759 reported on “the mob's further remonstrance against the importation of French words”. One of those words was ‘dentist’. Apparently, the Scots didn’t like it, preferred the term “tooth-puller” and threw a hissy fit. No matter, ‘dentist’ remained.

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Battlefield recycling

Lindsay was not just a dental historian, she was also part of that history. She was the first trained female dentist In Britain, qualifying in Edinburgh in 1895. Lillian was championed by an orthodontic legend, W Bowman Macleod, a man clearly unafraid to confront the big questions of the age. He once addressed the Odonto-Chirurgical Society of Scotland with probably the first paper to examine the effects of bagpipe playing on the teeth.

Dentists could fit sets carved from walrus, elephant and narwhal tusks, but human teeth were very popular. The end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century was a golden era for professional tooth hunters. The Napoleonic Wars meant rich pickings literally lay all around in the aftermath of an epic battle. Obviously, these battlefield recycling specialists took everything they could get from the dead – and the dying – but teeth were lucrative, and easy to transport. Following some bloody encounters, so many teeth were removed that they needed barrels to take them away.

Waterloo was a gold mine. The men with the pliers were out early, shipping the teeth back, ready to be boiled, assorted and assembled into sets. Even though technically the trade was prohibited, they even became a sort of brand name. Such was the patriotic fervour associated with Wellington's victory that these battlefield falsies were proudly worn as ‘Waterloo Teeth’.

It’s hard to know just how many of the soldiers who fell that day were dentally looted. We could analyse their skulls, but we’d have to find them first. Despite the terrible death toll, only three mass graves accounting for some 13,000 men have been found at Waterloo.

There is a very strong chance that they are not there. The dead of Waterloo didn’t rest easy even when they were underground. They lay quiet for a time, but then their bones were mined, crushed and sold as fertiliser. There’s probably no corner of that Belgian field forever a laddie of the Gordon Highlanders, but there may well be English fields fertilised by his bones.