The advances of plastic surgery in WWI

Nothing to do with writing, but this has been distracting me recently -

While I was in NZ, I read a fascinating article in the Listener about Sir Harold Gillies, a New Zealand-born surgeon who is credited as the 'father of plastic surgery'. Gillies worked during WWI at Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup, south-east London. His patients were servicemen with horrific injuries to their faces and hands - burns, gunshot and grenade wounds - from across the Allied forces including NZers. The Gillies Archive website includes an online portfolio of watercolour paintings of patients. The paintings, along with other records, were located in NZ and donated to the Gillies Archive in 1989.

Queen Mary's Hospital, Gillies seated at right.

His surgery techniques were revolutionary at the time, although crude by today's standards. They gave his patients a quality of life that otherwise they may not have had, but the reconstructions took place over months - even years - and during that time, it surely must have been hard to bear not only the injuries, but the in-between surgeries which caused even more destruction to foster the reconstruction.

He was one of the first surgeons in the world to discover and use the 'pedicle tube' - a method of skin-grafting where the new skin would be taken from, say, the chest, stitched into a tube and then the end applied to the area requiring the skin, to ensure blood flow in the grafted skin - this was a time before antibiotics and microsurgery and the ability to attach blood vessels together. Gillies used pedicle tubes, over months and months of surgery and treatment, sometimes 'walking' them up a soldier's body from stomach to wrist to face.

Following WW2, Gillies and his colleagues were also involved in pioneering gender-reassignment surgery, both female-to-male and male-to-female.

Artist/researcher Paddy Hartley has created Project Facade in response to Gillies work. He has looked at case studies of some of Gillies' patients and then created these amazing works of art, using army uniforms, to reflect each man, his history and treatment. The Project Facade site is really fascinating - not just for the artwork that Paddy has created, but also to read the individual stories about the men who were involved with all this groundbreaking surgery. It can be quite heartbreaking.

One of Hartley's case studies was William M Spreckley - you can see here the progression from admittance to the hospital through to a photo taken later in his life.

From the BBC: Spreckley was hugely grateful to Gillies and even named his son Michael Gillies in his honour.

Nevertheless, he was psychologically scarred, and his grand-daughter Alexandra Kingman says,

"He must have felt like a freak when it happened. All his life he still thought he looked hideous."