| Plastic surgeons -- Great Britain -- Biography. |
| Surgery, Plastic -- History -- 20th century. |
| Disabled veterans -- Rehabilitation -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century. |
| Disfigured persons -- Treatment -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century. |
| World War, 1914-1918 -- Medical care -- Great Britain. |
| Biographies. |
| Gillies, H. D. (Harold Delf), 1882-1960. |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Bestseller
Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize | Named a best book of the year by The Guardian
"Enthralling. Harrowing. Heartbreaking. And utterly redemptive. Lindsey Fitzharris hit this one out of the park." --Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile
Lindsey Fitzharris, the award-winning author of The Butchering Art , presents the compelling, true story of a visionary surgeon who rebuilt the faces of the First World War's injured heroes, and in the process ushered in the modern era of plastic surgery.
From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: humankind's military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured. In the midst of this brutality, however, there were also those who strove to alleviate suffering. The Facemaker tells the extraordinary story of such an individual: the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to reconstructing the burned and broken faces of the injured soldiers under his care.
Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world's first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of practitioners whose task was to rebuild what had been torn apart, to re-create what had been destroyed. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero, but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of the wounded but also their spirits.
The Facemaker places Gillies's ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine can be an art, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.
Author Notes
Lindsey Fitzharris is the author of The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine , which won the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing and has been translated into multiple languages. Her TV series The Curious Life and Death of . . . aired on the Smithsonian Channel. She contributes regularly to The Wall Street Journal , Scientific American , and other notable publications, and holds a doctorate in the History of Science and Medicine from the University of Oxford.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Medical historian Fitzharris (The Butchering Art) paints a fascinating portrait of pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies and the soldiers whose faces he rebuilt during WWI. Drawing on firsthand accounts of trench warfare, Fitzharris shows how "Europe's military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities," with facial wounds caused by shrapnel, burns, and infections far more common than in earlier conflicts. Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, first supervised a unit dedicated to face and jaw wounds at the Cambridge Military Hospital, where he developed new techniques for skin grafts and rebuilding noses and eyelids, then established Queen's Hospital in Sidcup, England--the first hospital devoted to facial reconstruction. Fitzharris spotlights some of Gillies's collaborators, including French American dentist Auguste Charles Valadier, who early in the war converted his Rolls Royce into a mobile operating room, and artist Henry Tonks, a trained doctor who created pictorial records of patients before, during, and after their operations. She also details the hard-won physical and psychological recoveries of patients like Pvt. Percy Clare, who was mistakenly sent to the wrong hospital before undergoing several operations at Queen's Hospital. Meticulously researched and compulsively readable, this exceptional history showcases how compassion and innovation can help mitigate the terrible wounds of war. (June)
Guardian Review
For many men fighting in the first world war, the fear of being permanently disabled was more terrifying than death. Yet worse even than the prospect of a life-changing disability was the horror of facial disfigurement. While men who lost a limb were treated as heroes, those who suffered facial injuries were often shunned or reviled. Mothers hurried their children indoors to avoid seeing these disfigured men; women broke off engagements with their mutilated fiances. Harold Gillies, a New Zealand-born surgeon who trained in Britain, helped thousands of men to literally face the world again. His work in the unit he created at the Queen's Hospital, Sidcup, has been overshadowed by the more familiar story of his cousin, Archibald McIndoe, who rebuilt the burnt faces of pilots in his "Guinea Pig Club" in the second world war. Yet it was Gillies, an extraordinarily compassionate man as well as a skilled surgeon, who really transformed the speciality of plastic surgery. In her engrossing book, Lindsey Fitzharris not only tells the story of Gillies's achievements, she immerses us in the world of the men he helped, following them from the carnage of the trenches to the wards where they made long and painful recoveries. Gillies was 32 when war broke out. He joined the Red Cross and was sent to France in 1915, where he first encountered men with appalling facial injuries caused by shells, shrapnel and sniper bullets. Plastic surgery was in its infancy. A few enterprising doctors had attempted reconstructive operations but mainly on noses and ears and with variable results. Some operations enabled patients to eat and speak but left gaping holes. Gillies realised that a specialist facial surgery centre was needed where patients would receive expert treatment and surgeons could perfect their skills. He was first allotted a ward at the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot, where he recruited a multidisciplinary team including dentists, nurses and an anaesthetist along with an artist to document their work. Before long, he was given his own dedicated centre in Sidcup, in a Georgian mansion surrounded by wooden huts, which opened as the Queen's Hospital in 1917. Men arrived with jaws, noses and cheeks destroyed, tongues torn out and eyeballs dislodged. Pilots in aircraft fires, sailors in explosions at sea and soldiers in tanks that caught fire were brought with their faces terribly burnt. Some had already had operations that left their features contorted, so Gillies had to reopen the wounds before beginning reconstruction. With no textbooks to follow, Gillies had to invent his own solutions, often sketching ideas on an envelope then performing multiple operations involving skin, cartilage and bone grafts. "He would set to work on some man who had had half his face literally blown to pieces with the skin that was left hanging in shreds," said a nurse who worked alongside him. Gillies took flaps of skin from patients' chests and elsewhere, leaving them attached by narrow strips to maintain blood supply, then swung them round to cover facial wounds. In one landmark operation, he sewed the strips into tubes - or "pedicules" - which reduced the risk of infection. Using these techniques, Gillies recreated noses, jaws, lips and eyelids. One man underwent 40 operations to rebuild his nose. To maintain morale, the hospital ran sports days and staged amateur dramatics. Patients were encouraged to walk the local streets where some benches were painted blue so that passersby would be warned in advance that a disfigured man might be sitting there. After the war, Gillies set up a private practice where he performed more pioneering operations including, in 1949, the first female-to-male gender reassignment. This is not a book for the fainthearted. Meticulously clear and detailed accounts of gruesome injuries and gruelling operations are supplemented by stunning portraits by the war artist Henry Tonks, who depicted patients before and after their reconstructions. Despite its harrowing subject, however, Fitzharris presents an intensely moving and hugely enjoyable story about a remarkable medical pioneer and the men he remade.
Kirkus Review
The author of The Butchering Art returns with "a new perspective on the terrible consequences of trench warfare, and the private battles that many men fought long after they put down their rifles." "Disfigured soldiers," writes Fitzharris, "often suffered self-imposed isolation from society following their return from war." While this has been true throughout history, the vast increase in military technology during World War I produced an avalanche of torn flesh and mutilated body parts that overwhelmed surgeons. Among more than 20 million injured, nearly 300,000 soldiers suffered facial trauma. In this often graphic yet inspiring, engaging book, the author focuses on Harold Gillies (1882-1960), a successful British ear, nose, and throat surgeon whose pioneering work in repairing faces places him among the war's few true heroes. Sent to France early in the war, he observed freelance dental surgeons (the Royal Army Medical Corps had none) experimenting with facial reconstruction. He quickly established that the first principle of battlefield surgery--to close gaping wounds--was a disaster for jaw and facial injuries. Unless the damaged underlying structures were repaired first, the procedures guaranteed a grotesque end result. Returning to the Queen's Hospital in London, Gillies persuaded the chief surgeon to establish a facial injury ward, which eventually grew to more than 1,000 beds and employed dozens of surgeon, dentists, artists, and sculptors who pioneered a new specialty: plastic surgery. The author's case reports of individual soldiers are not for the faint of heart, but she delivers a consistently vivid account of the ingenious techniques involving skin flaps, grafting, reconstruction, and prostheses, most of which Gillies and colleagues invented. Many victims required dozens of painful procedures, and not all succeeded, but his accomplishments, along with his compassion, made him an object of worship from patients. A "genuine visionary in his field," he received a good deal of favorable publicity in the media but only modest official recognition, including a knighthood in 1930, and he continued to practice until his death. An excellent biography of a genuine miracle worker. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this commendable biography of Harold Gillies, Fitzharris (The Butchering Art, 2017) describes the beginning of modern facial reconstructive surgery amidst the ghastly violence of WWI. Gillies was a devoted, innovative surgeon who repaired severe facial war wounds at Britain's Queen's Hospital. There he led a multidisciplinary team, including dentists, doctors, and even an artist. The utilization of skin flaps, bone grafts, weighted dentures, and other procedures were the start of plastic surgery. Maxillofacial damage often impairs the ability to eat and speak. Facial disfigurement can negatively affect personality, mood, and relationships. Some patients required dozens of operations followed by long recoveries and lasting distress. Stirring stories of maimed soldiers and the compassionate hospital staff who cared for them enrich the narrative. Fitzharris vividly details mutilated faces and the savagery, suffering, and slaughter of war. "The dead hung like laundry over barbed wire, covered inches deep with a black fur of flies." The empathetic, groundbreaking Gillies bemoaned the consequences of warfare. He prohibited mirrors on his hospital wards, and Fitzharris tells readers why: "Broken faces frequently led to broken hearts during the war."
Library Journal Review
Fitzharris (The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest To Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine), an Oxford-trained historian of medicine, writes an engaging, at times moving biography of Harold Gillies, whose work rebuilding the faces of British soldiers disfigured during World War I, laid the groundwork for developing modern plastic surgery. The book chronicles, with considerable pathos and sensitivity, the ethics and moral feelings that drove Gillies' work. He believed that individuals with facial disfigurements often suffered a kind of social isolation when they returned home. Surgery was a way of helping them regain dignity and be integrated into society. Gillies was pioneering and often experimental. At times his efforts were quite successful, and at other times, his efforts did not achieve his desired hopes. Still, he continued to develop his techniques in the hope that he could improve the lives of soldiers and make them more able to return to society. The book gives an especially detailed portrait of the hospital facility that Gilles established in order to do his work. VERDICT This book will interest both general readers and historians of medicine, and will remind readers of the long-term costs of the horrors of modern war.--Aaron Klink
Table of Contents
| A Note to the Reader | p. xi |
| Prologue: "An Unlovely Object" | p. 3 |
| 1 The Ballerina's Rump | p. 21 |
| 2 The Silver Ghost | p. 39 |
| 3 Special Duty | p. 55 |
| 4 A Strange New Art | p. 67 |
| 5 The Chamber of Horrors | p. 85 |
| 6 The Mirrorless Ward | p. 105 |
| 7 Tin Noses and Steel Hearts | p. 123 |
| 8 The Miracle Workers | p. 137 |
| 9 The Boys on Blue Benches | p. 159 |
| 10 Percy | p. 175 |
| 11 Heroic Failures | p. 191 |
| 12 Against All Odds | p. 205 |
| 13 All That Glitters | p. 221 |
| Epilogue: Cutting a Path | p. 229 |
| Notes | p. 253 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 295 |
| Index | p. 299 |