![\"Antique](\"https:\/\/thespecialteeth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/dentadura-dientes-humanos-museo-militar-dresde.jpg\")
Why a smile needed someone else’s teeth<\/h2>\n
In the late 18th century, anyone who could afford a denture had it carved from elephant, walrus or hippopotamus ivory. It was expensive and stained with use. To make the front teeth look natural there was a solution as obvious as it was sinister: use real teeth.<\/p>\n
In 1771 the surgeon John Hunter described, in The Natural History of the Human Teeth<\/em>, how a freshly pulled tooth could be placed in another person’s socket. Transplants rarely lasted: the teeth loosened and could pass on infection. In 1787 the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson mocked the practice. In his print, a fashionable dentist pulls teeth from a young chimney sweep to give them to a lady; on the door, a sign promises the best price for “live” teeth.<\/p>\n Where did the teeth come from? The records point to three sources.<\/p>\n The first was the living poor. In May 1784, the Mount Vernon accounts record a payment to enslaved people for nine teeth, on account of the French dentist Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur. Mount Vernon’s historians note that we do not know whether those people could refuse, or whether those teeth ever reached George Washington’s mouth. We tell that story in Washington’s teeth: the wooden myth hid another story<\/a>.<\/p>\n The second was the dead. In London, the so-called resurrection men dug up corpses to sell to anatomy schools, and teeth were a business of their own. James Blake Bailey, librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons, wrote in 1896 that these men did a large trade in teeth, which were then very valuable.<\/p>\n The most brutal case reached court in 1831. Bishop and Williams tried to sell the body of an Italian boy, Carlo Ferrari, to several schools. They had already pulled his teeth and sold them to a dentist for twelve shillings. A porter at King’s College grew suspicious of the body and they were caught.<\/p>\n The third source was the battlefield.<\/p>\n At Waterloo, in today’s Belgium, between 10,000 and 20,000 men died in a single day, along with thousands of horses. Visitors in the following days described bodies stripped of clothes and belongings and hastily buried in mass graves. Archaeologist Tony Pollard of the University of Glasgow notes that among those early visitors were looters who also took teeth to be made into dentures.<\/p>\n Most of the soldiers were young men. Their teeth were exactly what the market wanted. According to the Science Museum Group, so many were taken after the battle that the market was flooded and dentures with human teeth became known as “Waterloo teeth”. Museums, books and articles have repeated this for decades.<\/p>\n There is a problem with that sentence. Rachel Bairsto, curator of the British Dental Museum, which holds several of these dentures, told the BBC in 2015 that she had not found the phrase “Waterloo teeth” in 19th-century texts. If the name was not in use at the time, many patients may never have known where the teeth in their mouths came from.<\/p>\n Other experts add a second caveat: the battle did not invent the practice. Andrew Spielman of New York University’s College of Dentistry points out that dentures were using human teeth at least a century before 1815, and that battlefields had been harvested since the wars of the French Revolution.<\/p>\n None of this disproves that teeth were pulled at Waterloo. What changes is the status of the story. The looting is plausible and historians consider it likely. The name, however, looks like a later label: useful for explaining an era, but not enough to say which mouth any tooth in a museum case came from.<\/p>\n Waterloo holds another mystery. Despite thousands of deaths, archaeologists have recovered only two skeletons on the battlefield, plus amputated bones at the former field hospital. The mass graves described by early visitors have never been found.<\/p>\n In 2022 Pollard argued that the graves were emptied in the following decades so the bones could be sold as fertiliser, a trade mentioned in several British newspapers from the 1820s. A study by Bernard Wilkin, Robin Sch\u00e4fer and Pollard himself proposes another possibility: bone prices soared around 1833, when the sugar-beet industry arrived on the Waterloo plain. Neither hypothesis has yet been confirmed by excavation.<\/p>\n Dentures with human teeth were made for much of the 19th century; the Science Museum holds examples dated as late as 1890. In Britain, the Anatomy Act of 1832 gave schools a legal supply of bodies and ended the resurrection men’s trade. What finally replaced human teeth was technology: increasingly realistic porcelain teeth and, by mid-century, vulcanised rubber bases that were cheaper than ivory.<\/p>\n Documented:<\/strong><\/p>\n Still debated:<\/strong><\/p>\n A modern denture is made from acrylic resins and ceramics, custom-fitted to each mouth. When dentistry uses donor tissue, such as some bone grafts, that material comes with consent and traceability. If you wear a denture, you may want to read why it moves and when to have it adjusted<\/a> or how it compares with fixed teeth on implants<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Science Museum denture still has no name. Its teeth may have come from a soldier, a London graveyard or someone who needed a few coins. The label does not know, and that uncertainty is the most honest part of the story.<\/p>\n![\"1787](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Dentures_with_Waterloo_Teeth_-_Military_Museum_-_Dresden_-_Germany.jpg\")
A market that asked no questions<\/h2>\n
18 June 1815<\/h2>\n
The twist: a label that is hard to find<\/h2>\n
The missing dead<\/h2>\n
The end of a practice<\/h2>\n
What is known and what is still debated<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
Dentures today<\/h2>\n
Sources<\/h2>\n
\n