Mending the Soldiers: An Introduction – Harold Delf Gillies

Pioneer of plastic surgery and, later, much later, sex reassignment surgery, maxillofacial mastermind Harold Delf Gillies (later, Sir Harold Delf Gillies), pictured before the Great War. 

Plastic surgery is the process of reconstructing or repairing parts of the body by the transfer of tissue, and it has nothing to do with the plastic we know so well, that ground-breaking 20th Century invention that now blights our lives, other than that both take their names from the same root, the Greek word ‘plastikos’.  In the early years of the 20th Century, with the science still in its infancy (although you can trace reparative plastic surgery back hundreds, even thousands, of years, techniques had changed little – see above, from left, 1597, 1841, early 20th Century), operations were performed by general surgeons, but changes, as so often, would come with war.

Born in Dunedin in New Zealand in 1882, Gillies came to the U.K. at the turn of the century to study medicine at Cambridge University.  He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps on the outbreak of war in 1914, and was posted to France, where he worked as an assistant to a Franco-American dentist named Charles Auguste Valadier who was experimenting with the new technology of skin grafting to repair injured soldiers’ jaws.

From 1915 onwards, the static nature of trench warfare meant that on any given day the most likely place that a soldier would be hit was in the head, either from a shrapnel ball screaming down from an aerial shell explosion, or from an enemy bullet, should he expose just a little too much of himself above the trench parapet.  And with head and facial wounds becoming far more common, and medical advances leading to more soldiers surviving their injuries, on his return to England ‘for special duty in connection with plastic surgery’, these experiences in France led to Gillies persuading the chief surgeon of the British Army of the need to establish a specific facial injuries ward at Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot in Hampshire (above).

Gillies pictured with a group of soldiers, all with facial wounds, at Aldershot.  Before long, demand began to overwhelm the facilities at Aldershot, and a new hospital, dedicated to facial injuries and with around 1,000 beds, The Queen’s Hospital, was opened in Sidcup in Kent in July 1917.  More than 11,000 operations would be carried out there in the next few years on over 5,000 servicemen, as Gillies and his team developed their plastic surgery techniques.

Feel free to add your own caption to this photo of a forlorn Gillies and his apparently immobile car – everything seems nicely set up for a John Cleese moment, to my mind.  Between the wars he ran a private practice, was knighted, eventually, in 1930 for his Great War work, and during World War II acted as a senior consultant to various bodies, both governmental & military, being responsible, with others, for organising centres for plastic surgery throughout Great Britain, whilst training other doctors in plastic surgery techniques.  His post-war work in the field of sex reassignment surgery was groundbreaking, one technique from the early 1950s still in use into the 1990s.  Gillies would die on 10th September 1960, a month after suffering a stroke whilst operating (pity the poor patient).  He was 78.  And at some future point, and you have been forewarned, we shall be looking in much more detail at Gillies’ work during the Great War.