The Battle of Waterloo and Dentistry

The Battle of Waterloo and Dentistry

Real teeth were used in the most expensive dentures and were often illegally obtained from exhumed corpses and the bodies of executed criminals (nice!).

The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 left 51,000 dead. The day after the battle a whole army of scavengers started to strip the dead of everything including their teeth. Suddenly there were  mountains of teeth flooding the London markets, making real tooth dentures more affordable.

The name ‘Waterloo teeth’ came to mean any dentures made with real teeth (as in this photo). They were very sought after as they were made with teeth supposedly taken from a brave soldier cut down in his prime.

Thankfully Claudius Ash, a silver and goldsmith invented a denture to hold Porcelain teeth in, so denture wearers no longer had to wonder about the provenance of their teeth.

/by

The Queens Diamond Jubilee & 60 years of Orthodontics

1950s – stainless steel replaced gold as the material of choice

1960s – an Australian Orthodontist, Begg, proposes that 4 teeth need routinely extracting. His research on Aboriginals who have no crowding proposed that we extract 4 teeth to mimic tooth wear. This started a generation of extraction therapy.

1970s – Braces wrapped right around the teeth with bands as the technology to glue them in place was not very reliable (see photo).

1980s – NASA developed ‘nickel-titanium’ wires. These wires are floppy until they reach body temperature. They move teeth with low constant forces- a massive improvement on the previous steel (& gold) wires

1990s – Self ligating braces launched. A trap door replaces the high friction elastic ‘bungees’ that keep the wire in the bracket making treatment faster more comfortable and allowing more cases to be treated non-extraction

2000 – Invisalign Launched by 2 MBA graduates – a God-send for anyone wanting Orthodontics but not wanting a brace on show.

/by