From the book . . .
her brave contribution in Serbia.
After recuperating at Brockenhurst, Lewis “unfortunately broke her arm, causing some amazement amongst the staff by appearing for duty in that condition”.
She returned to New Zealand on the Willochra in 1916 and joined the NZANS [New Zealand Army Nursing Service] the following year.
In 1918 she sailed back to Britain to work at Codford [New Zealand general hospital]. Hundreds of Kiwi troops had limbs amputated due to the terrible effects of shellfire and gas gangrene.
Artificial limbs were made in England both at hospitals and by commercial companies, and, from mid-1917, at a Wellington factory built up by Gerald Tolhurst, himself an amputee.
New Zealand had its own prosthetic invention.
In June 1917, J Wiseman & Sons Ltd in Auckland was sure that “Disabled soldiers who have returned from the front, and their relatives will be interested in the demonstrations of the McKay Artificial Arm that are to be given at the Surgical Appliance Department”.
When Peter McKay of Collingwood near Nelson had had his left hand blown off by gelignite some three-and-a-half years earlier, the expensive American artificial arm he ordered proved useless, so he invented, and patented, his own.
Made of aluminium, the arm was operated by a strap attachment to the shoulder.
A “simple movement” of the shoulder muscles made the fingers of the artificial hand open and close, allowing the wearer to write, light and smoke a cigarette, hold a knife and fork, and drink “almost gracefully” from a glass of any size.
Other attachments enabled the wearer to “drive nails, [and] use an axe, a brace and bit, and other tools in a thoroughly effective manner”.
As the Wiseman advertisement explained, McKay was shortly leaving for England “at the instigation of Shell fragments, bullets often left jaws and noses.
Kiwi ear, nose and throat surgeon Harold Gillies convinced British authorities to open, first, a face and jaw unit, and then a purpose-built 1000-bed hospital at Sidcup in Kent.
One of the surgeons was another New Zealander, Henry Pickerill, who had been the first director of the Otago University Dental School.
The work of these two men established them as pioneers of plastic and facial reconstructive surgery. shrapnel and soldiers without
From the book . . .
A lively, engaging and idiosyncratic man, “who called everyone, man or woman, my dear or honey”, according to Juliet Nicholson’s book The Great Silence 1918-1920, Gillies was keen not simply to mend wounds but to improve appearances.
He would show his patients photographs of handsome young men and ask them to choose the chin or nose they might like.
“Broken and septic teeth were removed, dentures fitted, broken bones reset and skin-grafting carried out to reconstruct noses and jaws,” Kevin Brown wrote in Fighting Fit.
Eye sockets were filled, too, and ears replaced.
Gillies and his team also salvaged poorly treated cases, where terrible wounds had been closed by stitching without the lost tissue replaced.
Originally Gillies followed the established method of using a pedicle flap, where a piece of healthy skin, usually from the chest, was sutured to the wounded area to provide new grafted skin.
The other end remained attached to the source, thereby providing a blood supply.
These pedicles, particularly the longer ones, tended to curl inwards, like paper.
Gillies told biographer Reginald Pound it was his inspiration to realise: “If I stitched the edges of those flaps together, might I not create a tube of living tissue which would increase the blood supply to grafts, close them to infection, and be far less liable to contract or degenerate as the older methods were?”
See also: Jude Dobson in Flanders, Travel magazine
● ● With Them Through Hell
by Anna Rogers (Massey University Press, $65) is available now