‘A face is grafted on, and grows there…’

Inside the ‘chamber of horrors’ of Harold Gillies’s pioneering First World War plastic surgery ward

THE FACEMAKER by Lindsey Fitzharris

336pp, Allen Lane, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99

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In December 1917, a war correspondent was shown into the operating theatre of Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, where a man lay stripped to the waist, smeared in orange-tinted iodine, a face drawn on his chest like a mask. “These spots here are the eyes,” explained the surgeon, waving his scalpel. “This is where the nose will go, and here you see the mouth we shall give him.”

The patient’s face had been shattered a few days earlier. His nose would be built up with cartilage taken from his ribs, and his disfigured face then covered with the living skin from his chest; the tissue, fed naturally by blood, would grow in its new place and the scars would fade. Overwhelmed, the journalist fled from the theatre. “A revolution has come,” he later wrote in the Yorkshire Evening Post. “A new face is grafted on, and grows there, and becomes a real face, not a mask that hides horror.” The surgeon’s name was Harold Gillies, and his pioneering attempts at facial reconstruction are the subject of this meticulously researched new book by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris, author of an equally gore-flecked study of the surgeon Joseph Lister called The Butchering Art.

Plastic surgery had been around in a primitive form since the French revolution, but attempts at facial reconstruction were limited. Gillies, a Kiwi who had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1914 straight from St Bartholomew’s medical school, was on leave in Paris in June 1915 when he watched the French surgeon Hippolyte Morestin remove a cancer tumour from a patient’s face, then cover it with a flap of skin taken from their own neck. “It was the most thrilling thing I had ever seen. I fell in love with the work on the spot,” wrote Gillies, and by the next year he had requisitioned his own ward in Aldershot to cope with the grotesque procession of disfigured men disembarking from the hospital trains. Short staffed, he recruited medical students, retired doctors and even a vet to his team.

The work was not for the faint hearted. One nurse, Mary Borden, lifted the bandage from a soldier’s head and half his brain slipped out. She had a breakdown – and you can understand why. Even the notoriously sarcastic war artist Henry Tonks, who made before and after drawings of Gillies’s patients, was chastened by what he saw, christening Gillies’s ward “the chamber of horrors”. As a Daily Mail reporter put it: “Nowhere does the sheer horror and savagery of modern warfare appeal so vividly to the mind and senses… a face ravaged by shrapnel cannot fail to arouse a certain amount of repulsion.”

Fitzharris never loses sight of the humanity behind the grisly illustrations, however, reminding us that Gillies’s patients were real people, not “guinea pigs”, as Second World War burns victims would later be nicknamed, or something from a freak show (although one patient admitted he later spent time as “the Elephant Man” in a travelling circus). After the Battle of Jutland, in which HMS Indefatigable was shelled to smithereens and battlecruiser Queen Mary disappeared in a mushroom cloud, ratings on the nearby HMS Vanguard had to scour the decks with carbolic to get rid of the smell of rotting flesh, which blocked the ventilation shafts and voice pipes. One sailor, William Vicarage, had his eyelids burnt off by cordite and spent 18 months in a waking nightmare until Gillies constructed artificial eyelids that enabled him to sleep once more.

Another soldier, Private “Big” Bob Seymour, had his nose sheered off by a shell at the Somme. Gillies created a new one, though it looked more like a boxer’s than the Roman model he had selected. However Seymour was pleased enough with it to accept a job as Gillies’s private secretary and stayed for 35 years.

Not all stories ended so happily. “Corporal X”, who had his face blown apart at the Somme, spoke often of his childhood sweetheart, Molly. After surgery, he got hold of a forbidden shaving mirror and was so horrified that he wrote to Molly calling off their engagement. Rather than let her see his injuries, he told her that he had met somebody else. After the war, he became a recluse. Gillies was a gifted surgeon who could fix almost anything, but even he could not mend a broken heart.

One sailor had his eyelids burnt off and spent 18 months in a waking nightmare