PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)... she has successfully pieced together the story of a team of doctors, hospital workers and patients \'battling\' together during the First World War to modernize reconstructive plastic surgery. Through tangential but substantive anecdotes related to the plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, Fitzharris constructs a variegated and tender account of the First World War, its brutality and its narratives of human redemption ... Fitzharris perhaps missed an opportunity in her epilogue to show the impact of Gillies’s surgical ethos of teamwork, which was echoed in the Second World War wards of McIndoe (Gillies’s cousin) and Mowlem. In their partnerships with the artists Mollie Lentaigne and Dickie Orpen, these surgico-artistic teams mirrored the collaborative practice of Gillies and Tonks. Instead, and also importantly, Fitzharris’s epilogue connects Gillies to later surgical histories through discussion of the advances, ethical debates and teamwork of facial transplant surgeries ... tenderness and pathos pervade the personal stories of surgery and recovery, as well as Fitzharris’s engagement with the ethics of facial difference and display. Perhaps her next step will be to discard the acclaimed white male surgeon altogether, choosing instead to focus on the patients’ stories and individual heartbreaks and triumphs that make this book so successful.
