Europe was transformed into a giant black hole of a battlefield where the ability of the military technology to destroy far exceeded that of medical science to repair. The result was total carnage, even amongst the living soldiers. The damage done to the human body by these new war machines was unimaginable. The wounded were seemingly mangled beyond repair, the likes of which had scarcely been seen by medical personnel. More than 20,000 of those wounded had facial injuries.
The officers had a hard time explaining the concept of a machine gun or the power of an artillery shell to young soldiers who hadn't seen them. A soldier might stick his head out quickly to peek over the trench wall and get his nose shot off, or his chin or his cheek or his eyes and so on. This was a common occurrence on the front. Doctors had no idea how to deal with this swell of facial injuries.
A portrait by Otto Dix
These soldiers were called "The Men with Broken Faces" or "gueules cassées". There were so many of them during and after the war that in some combatant countries, a number of benches were painted blue indicating that the man sitting there would be distressing to look at. They endured total social isolation and alienation. Their faces were taken away from them and transformed on the battlefield to resemble the mud-churned pits of the trenches themselves. These men were the quintessential social pariahs of the day, not only for their specific disfigurement, but because their faces directly embodied the horrors of war and quite literally bore the inescapable reality of what we are capable of doing to each other. They often only found solace in each other and gave up any hope of leading a normal life. A unique brotherhood was formed where they pressed for their right to have underground social places of their own where they could be together without frightening the general public. Some of the veterans even took their families and started their own small communities far away from general society.
A native New Zealander, Dr. Harold Gillies was a surgeon who worked in field ambulances at the front in France. He observed a celebrated facial surgeon work in Paris and was so fascinated that he decided to specialize in facial reconstruction, no doubt inspired by the injuries he saw during the war. He founded Queen Mary's hospital in Sidcup, England especially for those with facial wounds. He would sometimes receive up to 2,000 patients a day. There, he revolutionized skin grafting techniques, facial reconstruction and dental practices still in use today. The hospital became the center of the world for facial surgery where all mirrors were banned. If the patients caught a glimpse of their reflection in a window or a metal surface, they often collapsed. The wounded soldiers looked up to Gillies and his staff as god-like saviors. He is today considered the father of plastic surgery.
This life-size wax sculpture illustrates skin grafting techniques using skin "pedicules". This is actually an ancient technique used by the Chinese and found in ancient Hindu medical texts, but it was further refined by Dr. Gillies.
These are some water colors illustrating some of the wounds, and the scars before and after surgeries.
Some photographs showing the evolution of various surgical techniques and their staggering transformation.
wearing a mask as well.
In many cases, even this revolutionary medicine could only do so much, and monstrous scars remained.
This is where the sculptors came in.
They set up shop in London and Paris and made masks for the soldiers, who lovingly referred to them as, "The Tin Nose Shops". Armed with a photograph of what the soldier used to look like, they would make a cast of his face first. Then they would pour in galvanized copper, one 30th of an inch thick, and let it cool. Next they would painstakingly paint them and use real human hair for eyebrows, mustaches and even stubble and eyelashes. Each mask took up to six months to make and usually had to be replaced every year or so.
A sculptor working amidst the casts of soldiers hanging on the wall.
Most of these masks are not around today because presumably, the men were eventually buried with them.
There is an exhibition in London right now by Project Façade, lead by Paddy Hartley. It's four years in the making, called "The Faces of Battle" about the men with broken faces. It's at The National Army Museum.
Based on individual case studies, textile sculptures were constructed about the history of each man's injury, surgery and subsequent healing process. The exhibition also features photographs and watercolors from Queen Mary's hospital.
read about it here
see the individual cases here
the watercolors
A french site featuring more photographs and notes about specific cases and the evolution of their healing processes.
During war, medical science progresses faster than at any other time in order to catch up with the harm inflicted by modern warfare. In WWII, neurosurgery was invented, for example. Today, the weapons we employ can easily atomize several million people in a moment. In the Iraq War, improvised explosive devices are capable of tearing off body parts just by the sheer force of the blast alone. Soldiers in this war are losing not only their faces, but all their limbs as well. In response, medical leaps and bounds have been made in the evolution of robotics, prosthetics and even an artificial skin called "frubber' that mimics the cellular structure of human skin. It's astounding how clever we are at patching ourselves back together again after we fall off the wall, but we always manage to fall harder and harder the next time until one day, the human body will be a memory.
2 comments:
Woah, that was very interesting! Those photos are arresting. Thanks for this post!
And to think I whine about getting up and going to work...
Have read much about the great war, but this really brings it into focus.
Shocking and poignant.
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