HISTORY
Sebastian Faulks
The Facemaker
One Surgeon’s Battle to
Mend the Disfigured
Soldiers of World War I
by Lindsey Fitzharris
Allen Lane £20 pp315
Harold Gillies was a surgeon
from New Zealand, of Scottish
heritage, who became famous
in the First World War for his
treatment of men whose faces
had been mutilated by bullets
and shrapnel or by fire on
board warships. Plastic
surgery was a new skill and
had nothing to do with
cosmetics. It was about giving
a man back a jaw, a nose,
cheeks, eye sockets and
enough self-confidence to
carry on living. Many of
Gillies’s patients were so badly
wounded and the operations
they underwent so painful,
numerous and invasive that
they died.
Machinegun bullets
spinning on the bone could
rip away most of the face and
soft tissues, including eyes
and nose, before they exited,
tearing a second hole on the
other side of the head.
Photographs of men wounded
in this way were used by
advocates of chemical warfare
to show that the sufferings of
gas casualties were actually
preferable. I have seen several
images in the Imperial War
Museum that I can never
unsee; and some of the
photographs in this book,
while justified in context, are
difficult to look at.
The attitude of the patients
to their misfortunes will be
familiar to anyone who hasstudied that generation:
stoical, unselfish, “merry and
bright” and “trusting to the
best of luck”. Here is the
mutilated man who writes
home to warn his mother that
she must expect a “rather
uglier duckling” than the one
she said goodbye to; but not
to worry, he’ll soon put
them all to shame when he
comes swanking home with
his new jaw and nose. And
here is the man who writes
to his fiancée with the tale of
his invented infidelity on
leave in Paris, which must
bring their engagement to an
end. He couldn’t bear to let
her see him and have to break
it off herself.
There were no mirrors in
the wards at hospitals in
Aldershot and Sidcup, where
Gillies did his pioneering
work. He is sympathetically
presented by Lindsey
Fitzharris as a combination of
new world optimism, Scottish
ingenuity and the surgeon’s
self-regard. Yet he had
modesty as well, when it
suited him: he learnt a good
deal from French dental
surgeons on the Western
Front and the way they
could rebuild jaws; he
subsequently liked to
have dentists on hand
in his clinics. He had
compassion for the
poor men, some of
whose faces he
could barely
look on
whenthey came to him. He had a
good understanding of
physiology from his time at
Cambridge (at Caius, although
Fitzharris doesn’t say so). HeHe gave
them back
their lives
This pioneering plastic surgeon brought
hope to the First World War’s wounded
was demanding but jocular;
happy to use established
techniques of grafts and flaps,
yet almost recklessly
experimental in his own
methods. He was a man to
whom everything seemed to
come easily, yet he was also
a ferociously hard worker.
Gillies was joined in his
work by Henry Tonks, later
a professor of fine art at the
Slade, who did pastels of the
men’s faces so that future
plastic surgeons could learn
from them. Many of these
pictures were lost when the
Luftwaffe bombed the Royal
College of Surgeons during
the Blitz. Neither Gillies nor
Tonks is in fact as little known
as Fitzharris believes. She
seems, for instance, unaware
of Pat Barker’s writing, albeit
in fictional form, about both
men. While the notes are full,
the book has no bibliography,Recipe for
disaster
Lisa Taddeo’s fiction
is all spice and no
flavour, says Johanna
Thomas-Corr
34
‘An absolute
treat’
India Knight is
bewitched by a
Cazalet-style novel
for the 21st century
35
Ingenuity Harold Gillies,
below, treated soldiers
injured like this man in 1918One patient
invented an
infidelity
to save his
fiancée’s
pain
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GETTY IMAGES28 29 May 2022