WATERLOO TEETH


I've seen battlefields white with human ivory
Noble dukes and princes stripped of flesh and finery
When the crows have done their job, they say that's the time for me
Sam Jones deliver them bones.                                            SAM JONES by Richard Thompson

Of all the strange exhibits in Liverpool's Victoria Museum, the Waterloo teeth have to be ranked amongst the very strangest.  A glass cabinet displays sets of dentures all made from human teeth stripped from battlefield corpses.

  Around 1815, someone realised these young soldiers had good, strong teeth that could be recycled.  Not all of these teeth were from Waterloo, but as this was one of the first and most notable battles to yield a large crop of this human ivory, Waterloo Teeth became something akin to a trade name.

  During the American Civil War many barrels of human teeth were stripped from the mouths of the war dead and shipped to Europe for the manufacturing of dentures.
 

  The Waterloo Teeth suggested this story ...

HUMAN IVORY by F.R.Maher

.I was born in 1799.  I can't recall cutting my first teeth, but I saw my sister's kiddies endure this most painful business.  When it came to the time, each one of them was grizzly and out of sorts.  All of them in turn crying in her arms, red blotched cheeks heavy with budding teeth.

  I must have been six when my own milk teeth began to grow out.  I remember wobbling a bottom tooth with my finger.  When it shed, it left a jelly socket beneath.  I showed my tooth to Mother.  She bade me keep it and put it under my pillow for the tooth fairy.

  Imagine my surprise when, next morning, I found it gone and in its place a farthing!  I had heard children of the the gentry were granted a whole sixpence, but our tooth fairy must have been as hard up as we were.  Anyway, it still seemed a very good trade to me.

  Less than ten years later in 1815, I traded again.  I 'took the King's shilling' and went to be a soldier.  Mother wept when I marched away and no doubt wept again when they came to tell her I had died.

  But not all of me perished on that battlefield.  Men and women scavengers came.  They took the very teeth out of my mouth and sold them.  They made a handsome amount, more than I had ever seen in life.

  My teeth were threaded onto a wire like beads then fashioned into a set of false teeth.  This is how they came to be in the mouth of a fat Duchess.  As she gorged, my teeth encountered the finest victuals that could be imagined, things I had only dreamt of in life; the very whitest of bread and the sweetest of puddings.

  The Duchess was digging her grave with my teeth.

  When she expired under her layers of fat,  they consigned her to the family vault, but my teeth did not go with her.  The family kept them, first as a memento, then as those who remembered her died out, as a curio.  They were almost thrown away in disgust in the 1900's but became objects of fascination later on and donated to a museum.

  They must have been in there behind a wall of glass for well over two hundred years.  After that there were wars and confusion and finally, for humankind, extinction.  The grass and trees grew back, but people never did.

  Another race decided there were things worth saving from this scarred planet.  Their archaeologists came and dug deep for signs of our race.  They found my teeth cocooned deep within the earth where the museum had once stood.  They seemed excited to find them, for deep within them, my teeth carry a trace of extinct DNA.
 
  They are cloning me.

  Long after you, the watcher on the other side of this glass, have gone, I will draw breath once again beneath an alien sun on a distant world.  'Teeth are funny things,' my mother used to say, 'They give you nothing but trouble,' but in their own way, my teeth have saved me