When Britain went to war with South Africa’s Boer republics in 1899, it found itself fighting not one but three enemies. There were the Boers themselves. There was disease: typhoid and dysentery claimed more lives than the fighting. And then there was tooth decay, which cost the army almost as many men as the Boers’ bullets did. Although the British army had state-of-the-art weapons, field hospitals equipped with the latest in anaesthetics and antiseptics, and even new-fangled X-ray apparatus that could pinpoint bullets, it saw no need for dentists. The result? The troops’ teeth were so bad they couldn’t cope with army rations. If a man couldn’t eat he couldn’t fight, so thousands languished in camp or were sent home because they had lost their teeth.

There was a time when a soldier’s teeth were a vital part of his kit. In the early 17th century, English army surgeons carried instruments for scaling and extracting teeth along with their bullet extractors and amputation saws. Later that century, the army introduced standards for its recruits that specified, among other things, how good their teeth should be. For some soldiers certain teeth were compulsory: a grenadier had to have enough front teeth to bite open the fuse of his grenade before lighting it. Musketeers also needed good front teeth to pull the wooden caps off their powder cartridges before pouring the charge into their muskets. Incisors were considered to be of such military importance that it was an offence to remove them from a man of military age.

By the mid-19th century, however, the army had dispensed with old-fashioned grenades and swapped…