THE MAN WITH MAGIC HANDS

The Facemaker Lindsey Fitzharris Allen Lane £20

The men who came home from the First World War missing a limb were, in a sense, the lucky ones. Far worse, from a psychological point of view, were those whose faces had been destroyed.

Missing noses, eyes that would no longer close, tongues that had melted into stumps were now a common sight. No wonder children hid when Daddy came home looking like a monster, while fiancees explained sadly that the engagement was over.

Employers insisted on mutilated men staying out of sight so they wouldn’t scare the public. It was thanks to improved techniques in the field hospitals of France and Belgium that so many men survived their injuries. Now it was up to cutting-edge medicine to give them a life worth living.

This was where Harold Gillies came in. A surgeon from New Zealand, Gillies (pictured right on his wedding day to Marjorie Clayton) was a pioneer in restorative plastic surgery. Under his magic hands noses were rebuilt, chins were prised away from chests, jaws that had clamped together were loosened again. Thanks to the team he assembled at a South London hospital, men who had considered suicide found the courage to resume their lives.

In this fascinating book, Fitzharris reminds us there is nothing superficial about plastic surgery’s ability to heal minds as well as bodies. Gillies’ work went beyond nose jobs and often involved rebuilding the whole face.

Take the case of William Spreckley, a lieutenant who had a crater in the middle of his face. A passage describes how Gillies took a bit of cartilage from one of Spreckley’s ribs and whittled it until it looked like an arrowhead.

He implanted this into the patient’s forehead, near the hairline, where it remained for six months. Then he took a bit of skin from another part of Spreckley’s body and placed this below the arrowhead.

Once a viable blood supply had been established, Gillies swung the cartilage and skin graft downwards to construct the bridge of a new nose.

At first it seemed that the thing had gone horribly wrong: Spreckley looked as though he had grown an elephant’s trunk, and his fellow patients couldn’t help laughing. It was for this reason that Gillies banned mirrors from his wards. Gradually, though, the swelling subsided and the brave young man looked near to normal, to the point where he was happy to join up for the next war.