Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Alberti, Fay Bound

Titel

Harold Gillies and the battleground of surgical innovation

Ist Teil von

• The Lancet (British edition), 2022-06, Vol.399 (10341), p.2094-2095

Ort / Verlag

London: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The damaged faces of soldiers treated by Harold Gillies have become something of a staple of popular culture since the World War 1 centenary. [...]shocking pictures” of “horribly disfigured” servicemen have featured in British tabloids, their faces assembled into a jarring photo-mosaic, showing a damaged mass of missing jaws and blown-away noses before being salvaged, corrected, and filled in by the pioneering New Zealander and so-called father of plastic surgery. Lindsey Fitzharris’ The Facemaker: One Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I does not shy away from the human experience behind the facial injury. The loss of life in World War 1 was far higher than in any previous war, and so was the degree of physical damage inflicted on soldiers’ bodies by automated machinery combined with trench warfare. Having spent his early years “tottering around the cavernous rooms of a Victorian villa”, as Fitzharris puts it, his background—including being sent from New Zealand to England for preparatory school, before studying medicine at Cambridge University—must have provided Gillies with the necessary cultural capital to thrive in the hierarchical context of fin de siècle British medicine.