Grisly yet inspiring ... Fitzharris depicts her hero as irrepressibly dedicated and unfailingly likable. The suspense of her narrative comes not from any interpersonal drama but from the formidable challenges posed by the physical world ... The Facemaker is mostly a story of medical progress and extraordinary achievement, but as Gillies himself well knew — grappling daily with the unbearable suffering that people willingly inflicted on one another — failure was never far behind.
Both heartbreaking and inspiring, The Facemaker tells a profound story of survival, resurrection and redemption ... The Facemaker is not only a stirring tribute to the singular humanity and greatness of one man but a haunting and unforgettable elegy to the sacrifice and suffering of all the soldiers of that war.
A fascinating medical history ... As Fitzharris works her way through various types of trauma...she chronicles the rise of the various medical arts brought to bear in treating them. She threads into such discussions cultural commentary and a social history of ableist notions of beauty and health ... Fitzharris successfully balances the story of plastic surgery’s growth with a compassionate attention to those whose wounds made it possible. Photos that document the 'before and after' faces of patients are chosen with due care.
In her engrossing book, Lindsey Fitzharris not only tells the story of Gillies’s achievements, she immerses us in the world of the men he helped ... This is not a book for the fainthearted. Meticulously clear and detailed accounts of gruesome injuries and gruelling operations are supplemented by stunning portraits by the war artist Henry Tonks, who depicted patients before and after their reconstructions. Despite its harrowing subject, however, Fitzharris presents an intensely moving and hugely enjoyable story about a remarkable medical pioneer and the men he remade.
Fitzharris, a historian of science and medicine, has written a riveting, old-fashioned, man-meets-the-moment account of Gillies' work in the field of plastic surgery ... There's an inherent danger of sensationalism in this subject of gruesome facial injuries, but Fitzharris is a pretty straightforward writer, relying on letters, reports and newspaper accounts to give vivid immediacy to the patients' ordeals ... In The Facemaker, Fitzharris includes a few before-and-after photographs of Gillies' patients. It's impossible to look at these side-by-side photos of their faces without feeling, first, ashamed and, then, awed by what we humans are capable of doing to and for each other.
The process of facemaking, Fitzharris captivatingly shows, required both surgical innovation and artistic skill ... Fitzharris doesn’t sensationalise the gory details of the battlefield or operating theatre. But she does not look away either. Sometimes distressing, sometimes thrilling, The Facemaker had me gripped; it is elegantly written and endlessly fascinating. Employing just the right balance between diligent research and ingenious reanimation, Fitzharris brings to life a neglected slice of medical history, telling both Gillies’ story as well as that of many of the men whose faces — and lives — he saved.
With rich, glossy strokes The Facemaker restores a sense of immediacy to the daily struggles facing Gillies and his colleagues as they improvised under constant pressure ... hits its stride when it is explaining Gillies’ surgical methods ... Although the fixation on gritty minutiae is the book’s best characteristic, it does leave the narrative open to tangents. Several pages are devoted to retellings of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination and the Battle of Jutland, which are enjoyable but extraneous...Fitzharris struggles to remove her close-up lens when a wide-angle would be preferable ... ertainly, however, The Facemaker enriches our impression of Gillies.
Conveys the emotional, physical and psychical effects of having an injured and altered face, directly from those who had to deal with them ... Fitzharris offers a long history of plastic surgery ... In many ways, this is the story of a hero ... There are a lot of powerful stories in this book. But Gillies’s heroism isn’t quite enough to drive a narrative. The soldiers are treated gently and with respect, although we don’t really get to know them enough to distinguish them from one another ... Fitzharris is presented with a tricky dilemma: how to honor these men as people in their own right, and not just experimental subjects or links in the chain of Gillies’s research agenda ... We don’t always know what the soldiers thought about it all. That’s understandable ... We already knew that pain is real ... That doesn’t make the soldiers’ testimony any less powerful, empathetic and meaningful.
... 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.
Fitzharris is a gifted storyteller and delights in just about the right amount of detail ... lived up to the promise of the prologue. Buy this book (locally) and you too will have a book on your hands.
As heartbreaking stories emerge daily from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s difficult to imagine anything uplifting coming from any war ever. But author Lindsey Fitzharris reveals hope in the carnage of a long-ago conflict in The Facemaker ... Detailed explanations about the evolution of skin grafts, flaps, and the development of techniques such as tubed pedicules make it clear Fitzharris did her homework. Yet even though the story she weaves is compelling, its structure is somewhat confusing. It’s ironic that a book about early plastic surgery could’ve used some nipping, tucking, and rearranging to streamline its flow ... Too many times, paragraphs surely intended to be brief backgrounders about newly introduced topics read like lengthy Wikipedia entries, plunging readers down unwelcome rabbit holes. These detours distract from the story the author promised to tell — an intimate account of the struggles of Gillies’ team and the traumatized soldiers they mended ... Jarringly, the reader is left hanging for 172 pages before again encountering the plight of Percy Clare, an English private whose devastating injuries are featured in a gripping battle tale in the book’s prologue ... And it’s disappointing that the epilogue was treated as a catch-all for the author’s research leftovers because it makes for a disjointed read. Buried within it are tantalizing revelations better suited for existing or new chapters.
Commendable ... Stirring stories of maimed soldiers and the compassionate hospital staff who cared for them enrich the narrative. Fitzharris vividly details mutilated faces and the savagery, suffering, and slaughter of war.
An engaging, at times moving biography of Harold Gillies ... The book gives an especially detailed portrait of the hospital facility that Gilles established in order to do his work ... This book will interest both general readers and historians of medicine, and will remind readers of the long-term costs of the horrors of modern war.
A fascinating portrait ... Meticulously researched and compulsively readable, this exceptional history showcases how compassion and innovation can help mitigate the terrible wounds of war.
