Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

The Battle of Waterloo took place one Sunday afternoon in 1815.

It was Napoleon's last stand, one of the most gruesome battles ever waged, ending France's almost total control over Europe.

More than 50,000 French British and Prussian troops died, an absolutely staggering loss of life.

But many of these soldiers had a very strange afterlife.

Well, I mean their teeth did.

Yes, I said their teeth.

Before I get to those teeth, there are a couple things you need to know.

First, the Napoleonic days were desperate times throughout Europe.

The poor were really, really poor.

Clothes were hard to come by, so was food.

But the rich had a different problem.

Sugar.

As it showed up in more and more villages like a sweet opioid from heaven, many became addicted to this stuff.

But advice to brush and floss twice a day wasn't really a thing back then, and their teeth, in turn, paid the price, rotting and falling out.

Okay, back to Waterloo.

After the battle was over, there was a great pilfering of the piles and piles of dead bodies

by people known as body strippers. In his book, Waterloo, The After aftermath, Paul O'Keefe quotes a soldier who wrote

that, A man falls by your side in the very next moment, if you chance to look around,

he is naked as he was when he came into the world. By 9 a.m. on the day after the battle,

peasants had stripped just about every dead soldier they could find.

Shoes and stockings were the most prized items, O'Keefe wrote.

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