Meet Harold Gillies, the World War I surgeon who rebuilt the faces of wounded soldiers

In August 1917, a British World War I soldier named John Glubb was hit in the face by a grenade. He remembered blood flowing in “streams” and felt what looked like a chicken bone move around his left cheek. It turned out to be half of his jaw, broken off by the blow.

Glubb wasn’t the only hapless WWI soldier to suffer a disfiguring facial injury. Shells filled with shrapnel were designed to do as much damage as possible, and the need to look over trench parapets to assess the battlefield or fire a shot meant a greater risk of being hit in the face by bits of flying metal . Unlike losing a limb, these soldiers faced significant social and professional stigma when they returned from the front because of their disfigurement. They were usually restricted to night shifts and relegated to special blue benches when in public – a warning to others to avert their eyes.

Fortunately for these men, a New Zealand-born surgeon named Harold Gillies devoted his life to developing innovative techniques for reconstructing faces after witnessing the massacre while serving on the front lines. Back home, he set up a special unit for soldiers with facial wounds at Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot, eventually convincing his superiors that a special hospital was needed. He is often referred to as the “father of plastic surgery” due to his pioneering work at The Queen’s Hospital (later renamed Queen Mary’s Hospital) at Frognal House in Sidcup.

Gillies is a key figure in a new book by author and medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris entitled The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Struggle to Restore the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I† A well-known science communicator with a great follow twitter and a taste for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The butcher’s artin 2017 – an amazing, if at times creepy, reading experience.

Her work soon caught the attention of the Smithsonian Channel, who offered Fitzharris to host their 2020 documentary series revisiting infamous historical cold cases, The Curious Life and Death of…† Fitzharris usually has several book ideas that are simmering on the back burner. She has a children’s book next year illustrated by her husband, cartoonist/caricaturist Adrian Teal, and is already working on a third book about a 19th-century surgeon named Joseph Bell, who inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

The Face Maker was not her first choice for a sequel to The butcher’s artbecause she was not very well informed about the First World War. But her publisher loved Gillies’ story, so Fitzharris gave herself a crash course in the history of that period. “The Butcher’s Art” is hyperfocused on one man, Joseph Lister, who applied germ theory to medical practice,” Fitzharris told Ars. “This book is not about one man, it’s about many men. It’s about Harold Gillies, the pioneering surgeon who rebuilt soldiers’ faces during World War I, but it’s also about these disfigured men. I hope their voices really resonate in the story.”

Ars spoke to Fitzharris for more information.

(Warning: Some graphics and descriptions of facial reconstructions follow.)

Ars Technica: This is such a big topic. How did you narrow the focus so that the scope was manageable?

Lindsey Fitzharris: It’s true, it was a much more complicated story. I think that’s why it took me five years to write, to understand the magnitude of the First World War, military medicine at that time, with all these complicated developments. One of the challenges of World War I is that there is so much material: so many diaries and letters from the soldiers writing about their experiences. Someone asked me what the difference is between academic history and the commercial history I write. Much of what I do now is throw information away. I include a lot in my research, but I push that away because I don’t want to overwhelm the reader. I want to find the pulse of the story.

I knew I wanted to drop the reader in the trenches from the start. There is a man named Percy Clair who wrote this wonderful journal, which allowed me to tell the story of what it was like to be injured, punched in the face, and lay on the battlefield for a long time before being recovered. I wanted readers to understand how difficult it was initially just to get off the battlefield and then to get to Gillies because Clair was initially sent to the wrong hospital.

There were also complications around access to patient records in the UK and what you can and cannot say regarding a patient’s name. When I use a patient’s name in The Face Maker, it’s because that knowledge is public, or Gillies herself had ever published it. If Gillies published about a particular patient, if I went into the records and found further information that he had not included, I would not be able to use that information in connection with that person’s name. The butcher’s art didn’t have that complication because it was set in the 19th century. Everything was old enough that we didn’t have to worry about that. But much of the material for The Face Maker is subject to copyright. I had to contact Percy Clair’s relatives to get permission to quote from his journal, as far as I did.