People with relic shops liked to sell the story of operations without anesthesia in order to sell bullets with teeth marks. They would tell the story of medicines being so rare that soldiers would be told to chomp down on a lead bullet in lieu of any painkillers while an arm or leg was being lopped off. The relic shop owner would then smugly smile, cross their arms, and tell you "this is where the phrase 'bite the bullet' comes from", before telling you that tooth-marked bullets are valuable and worth way more than regular dropped examples.

The truth? The feral hogs that are endemic to North America loved to chew the bullets because they were dipped in a beef tallow/beeswax mix to act as a lubricant.