Medical miracles of war
REMINDING us once more that there’s life after politics and that it needn’t mean becoming a galloping Gangnam nincompoop on Strictly, former Tory minister Michael Portillo (right) is back tonight with his excellent social history show.
Series two of PORTILLO’S HIDDEN HISTORY OF BRITAIN (Channel 5, 9pm), where each week he visits an abandoned building with a fascinating past, begins at the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot, Hampshire.
It’s a story which, if you’re squeamish, you’ll no doubt be inclined to approach a little warily (the institution’s name alone, I grant you, doesn’t augur well) but what happened at this place was so extraordinary and so groundbreaking that I’d urge you to take a deep breath – or, perhaps more apt, brace yourself with a medicinal brandy or two – and tune in to this episode regardless.
Unless, that is, you have a particularly soft spot for pigs. I’ll explain about that in a moment.
Opened in the summer of 1879, the now-derelict Cambridge Military Hospital was where, during the First World War, a pioneering military medic called Harold Gillies effectively invented modern-day plastic surgery, operating on wounded soldiers who’d suffered the most terrible facial disfigurements.
The extent of the damage done to these men can be seen in some truly harrowing photographs, the monochrome graininess of these century-old images doing little to soften their impact.
Yet Gillies believed he could help repair the worst of their facial injuries and, in doing so, give them back both their lives and their identities.
To find out more about the pioneering techniques involved, Michael speaks to a modern-day military surgeon, Colonel Alan Kay.
This, just so you’re warned, is one of the bits of the programme where they wheel on a pig carcass for illustrative purposes, Colonel Kay picking up his scalpel and giving us a thoroughly informative but, it has to be said, rather grisly demonstration of Gillies’ methods.
(Another carcass, in an earlier demonstration, has been subjected to a hail of bullets, leaving us in no doubt as to the extent of the damage that would have needed repairing).
As so often in this series, Michael is clearly fascinated by what he’s learnt.
“Everything you’ve told me has astonished me,” he tells Colonel Kay. “I had no idea any of this stuff happened.”
There’s an intriguing twist to Gillies’ story, we then discover, as many years later, in 1951, he applied his surgical techniques in an even more radical field, secretly (and illegally) performing a pioneering gender reassignment on former Spitfire pilot Robert (who then became Roberta) Cowell. Michael meets Cowell’s daughter Diana, who was just a little girl when this happened and who admits she found it hard to accept. “I don’t think I’ve ever got over the shock,” she confesses. “I’m still very emotional about it because I always have this little hurt child in my heart: ‘I want my daddy, I want my daddy…’”