The Facemaker
by Lindsey Fitzharris
Many of us have heard of Gillies, the innovative doctor who – beavering away in the secluded grounds of Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, Kent – revolutionised the surgery undertaken to restore the faces of servicemen horrifically wounded at the Front during the First World War. We may have a mental image of some of the men, and their traumatic maxillofacial injuries, as depicted for instance by the former surgeon-turned-artist Henry Tonks. Yet what more do we know?
In historian Lindsey Fitzharris initially takes us back to the early days of war, when there was no established medical infrastructure to treat the men – of which there were many – suffering from the facial injuries so particular to WWI, when a single inadvertent peep over the top of the parapet could cost a man
