The Facemaker

"The Facemaker" is the historian Lindsey Fitzharris’ international bestseller about one surgeon’s battle to mend the disfigured soldiers of World War I.

 

In the First World War mankind's military technology was steps ahead of the medical. The development of tanks, machine guns and shrapnels combined with the nature of the trench warfare slaughtered countless of young soldiers and left even more wounded and disfigured. When the Cambridge-educated doctor and New Zealander, Harold Gillies, saw the human wreckage from the front he decided to step into the nascent field of plastic surgery. In the south-east England of Sidcup he assembled a group of doctors, nurses and artists on one of the first hospitals dedicated to facial reconstruction to help those soldiers who had lost their face in the war and became a monster to society. Lindsey Fitzharris tells this gripping story with meticulously researched details and vivid accounts of how art and medicine was merged in making a better life for the disfigured soldiers.