During the Great War, surgeon Harold Gillies helped thousands of men to literally face the world again.
During the Great War, surgeon Harold Gillies helped thousands of men to literally face the world again. A procession of men arrived at his London Queens Hospital with jaws, noses and cheeks destroyed, tongues torn out and eyeballs dislodged. With no textbooks to follow, Gillies had to invent his own solutions. ‘He would set to work on some man who had had half his face literally blown to pieces with the skin that was left hanging in shreds,’ remembered a nurse. While men who lost a limb were treated as heroes, those suffering facial injuries were often shunned. Mothers hurried their children indoors to avoid seeing them, while women broke off engagements to their disfigured fiancés. Unsurprisingly, disfigured men suffered bouts of despondency and melancholia, which sometimes lead to suicide. Gillies’ wife, Kathleen, frequently visited the wards, where she tried to ‘revive hope in despairing hearts.’ Another nurse remembered that the hardest thing to d...