Faces off
Humankind’s ability to destroy itself has always outweighed its desire to fix the broken pieces. Conflict and war create great suffering, anguish and death, but they also lead to discoveries in technology, industrialization and, we learn from Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Facemaker, the invention of cosmetic and reconstructive surgery. At the dawn of the Great War, it became painfully evident to those in the trenches that contemporary developments in warfare had far exceeded those in the world of medicine. These ghastly developments are illustrated in great detail in Fitzharris’s book, which tracks the military career and early life of Harold Gillies, the man who is largely credited as the father of modern plastic surgery as well as with having performed the first phalloplasty.
