The Tin Noses Shop

[David Morris]

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2007/february/mask.php?page=1

Wounded tommies facetiously called it "The Tin Noses Shop." Located
within the 3rd London General Hospital, its proper name was the "Masks
for Facial Disfigurement Department"; either way, it represented one
of the many acts of desperate improvisation borne of the Great War,
which had overwhelmed all conventional strategies for dealing with
trauma to body, mind and soul.

[...]

Writing in the 1950s, Sir Harold Gillies, a pioneer in the art of
facial reconstruction and modern plastic surgery, recalled his war
service: "Unlike the student of today, who is weaned on small scar
excisions and graduates to harelips, we were suddenly asked to produce
half a face." A New Zealander by birth, Gillies was 32 and working as
a surgeon in London when the war began, but he left shortly afterward
to serve in field ambulances in Belgium and France. In Paris, the
opportunity to observe a celebrated facial surgeon at work, together
with the field experience that had revealed the shocking physical toll
of this new war, led to his determination to specialize in facial
reconstruction. Plastic surgery, which aims to restore both function
and form to deformities, was, at the war's outset, crudely practiced,
with little real attention given to aesthetics. Gillies, working with
artists who created likenesses and sculptures of what the men had
looked like before their injuries, strove to restore, as much as
possible, a mutilated man's original face. Kathleen Scott, a noted
sculptress and the widow of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott of Antarctica
fame, volunteered to help Gillies, declaring with characteristic
aplomb that the "men without noses are very beautiful, like antique
marbles."

AdvertisementWhile pioneering work in skin grafting had been done in
Germany and the Soviet Union, it was Gillies who refined and then
mass-produced critical techniques, many of which are still important
to modern plastic surgery: on a single day in early July 1916,
following the first engagement of the Battle of the Somme—a day for
which the London Times casualty list covered not columns, but
pages—Gillies and his colleagues were sent some 2,000 patients. The
clinically honest before-and-after photographs published by Gillies
shortly after the war in his landmark Plastic Surgery of the Face
reveal how remarkably—at times almost unimaginably—successful he and
his team could be; but the gallery of seamed and shattered faces, with
their brave patchwork of missing parts, also demonstrates the
surgeons' limitations. It was for those soldiers—too disfigured to
qualify for before-and-after documentation—that the Masks for Facial
Disfigurement Department had been established.