Tens of thousands of soldiers returned home with their faces destroyed during the World War I. A man without an arm or a leg was a cripple, even a hero. A man without a face was simply a plague, perhaps a monster.
After his experience on the battlefield, Harold Gillies He set out to restore dignity to those who had been disfigured by shrapnel and chemical weapons.
Born in New Zealand in 1882, Gillies was a Cambridge-trained British otorhinolaryngologist who had served as a junior physician in France during the Great War. There he attended a dentist who treated maxillofacial wounds, but who could not operate without the supervision of a surgeon.
His knowledge of the anatomy of the head and neck allowed him to carry out this work during his mission, from which he returned with two lessons: the importance of dentistry for facial reconstruction and the transformative capacity of plastic surgery.
Already in England, he worked at the Cambridge Military Hospital (Aldershot) and in 1917 he founded the Queen’s Hospital (Sidcup), dedicated exclusively to facial reconstruction. His experience in France led him to create a multidisciplinary team. There he had seen how various professionals tried to fix the soldiers’ faces, but independently. To refine the result, he decided to surround himself with professionals from different health branches (surgeons, doctors, dentists, dental technicians, nurses and radiologists), as well as artists (painters, draftsmen, sculptors and photographers) and mask makers.
“Throughout the war, Gillies adapted and improved rudimentary techniques of plastic surgery and devised completely new ones,” explains the American historian Lindsey Fitzharris in her book The face reconstructor (Captain Swing), where he details that he not only set out to restore their faces, but also their state of mind.
However, one of his operations was a failure. Not so much because of his work, but because of the disposition of Corporal X, whose code name sought to protect his identity.
He arrived at Cambridge Military Hospital after the Battle of the Somme, where he managed to recover thanks to the care of nurse Catherine Black. His face was destroyed by shrapnel and infected wounds, but the biggest tear was the memory of his fiancée Molly, the daughter of some landowners who did not view the relationship favorably.
Before asking for her hand, he worked hard in his law firm to gain wealth, although he did not hesitate to enlist as a volunteer and leave his country behind. The letters of Molly They continued to arrive, already with another destination, while he convalesced in the hospital. He didn’t want me to visit him until the bandages were removed from his face: “He would be scared to death if he saw me lying here like a mummy.”
He cape He didn’t know the state of his face. In reality, no soldier could see himself, because the medical center lacked mirrors. Harold Gillies had banned them so that patients could observe their recomposed features, not during the tedious process. “He realized that only those who had been blinded in combat kept their spirits up while their faces were being reconstructed,” he writes. Lindsey Fitzharris.
So, the stigma of a disfigured face was associated with the sin of syphilis or the curse of leprosy. “If an amputated leg could arouse sympathy and respect, a deformed face usually caused disgust and aversion,” adds the historian. It was of little use to them to enjoy all the welfare benefits of the Ministry of Defense if their face was considered an “external sign of moral or intellectual degeneration”, if that mark meant their isolation from society, if even “girlfriends broke off their engagement and children ran away when they saw their father.
To ward off prejudice, the pioneer of modern plastic surgery did everything he could. He was aware that repairing superficial tissues was not enough, but he also had to pay attention to the architecture of the face. And that, in addition to improving its aestheticsthe face had to restore its function.
“Gillies could only use his imagination to visualize these complex surgical procedures, and it was common to see him making hasty sketches on envelopes when an idea occurred to him,” writes Lindsey Fitzharris, who describes the physiognomy of that facial battlefield: “Noses torn off shattered jaws, dislodged tongues, and burst eyeballs, in some cases, the entire face was erased like a blot.”
What an impression it would make on people if benches reserved for patients were painted blue around Queen’s Hospital: so passersby could look away from the horror. “A method that was stark in its simplicity […]. Unfortunately, this only increased the marginalization of disfigured people,” reflects the author of The face reconstructor.
When the bandages were removed, his mother did not recognize her son, although she hid her displeasure. “She turned white as a sheet. For a moment I thought she was going to faint, but not the slightest expression on her face or her voice gave her away,” recalled Nurse Black, who noticed a glow while she was putting up some screens to hide the bed at the soldier’s request. It was a shaving glass in which he had seen his face reflected.
“Corporal disfigured face and turned it against himself. “With that appearance he did not feel worthy of being loved,” writes the American historian.
The nurse tried to cheer him up and suggested that he allow his girlfriend to visit him. “He’s not coming anymore,” replied the soldier, who had just sent him a letter in which he broke off his engagement with the false excuse that he had met a woman in Paris.
“It wouldn’t be fair for a girl like Molly to be tied to a wreck like me,” he confessed to Catherine Black. “I won’t let him sacrifice himself out of pity. This way, he’ll never know.” Nor did he know that, when he left the hospital, he confined himself to his home for life.
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