I’m not a big fan of war stories, but I happened to hear Lindsey Fitzharris on one of my favorite podcasts talking about her two books (she now has a third, but the podcast episode was recorded a while ago). The first book is about a surgeon in WWI. When her publisher gave her a list of names for the audiobook narrator, she noticed one had the same last name as the man she wrote about in the book. It turned out he was a direct descendant, so of course she had to choose him.
My library doesn’t have her first book, but it does have this one, which is about the grandfather of plastic surgery as we know it. Apparently he has a great-great-grandnephew who is a semi-famous actor. The author tweeted at him asking if he’d be interested in narrating the audiobook she had written about his ancestor and he said yes. My library does carry that audiobook, so I promptly downloaded it.
Gillies did a really great job with the narration. He has a great voice for it, he kept it engaging, and his pronunciation of French words was spot on.
Fitzharris said in the podcast that her goal was to educate the reader on the subject without overloading them with information. So much happened during WWI that I’m sure just the topic of plastic surgery could take up several books, but I think Fitzharris achieved her goal. I certainly learned a lot about the history of plastic surgery, but the audiobook is less than 10 hours.
Fitzharris does start by giving us a little of Harold Gillies’s life before the war. He wasn’t an old man when the war started, but he wasn’t a teenager either. He was in his thirties, married, and had just been offered his highest-paying job as a surgeon when the war started.
Fitzharris also gives a fairly brief rundown of the assassination of the Arch Duke Ferdinand. I kind of zoned out for that chapter because I had recently listened to two podcast episodes that went pretty in depth into that whole affair.
When it comes to plastic surgery, I hadn’t known anything about it before reading this book. I hadn’t realized the practice dated all the way back to ancient times!
I also had not known that soldiers with facial deformities were ostracized while soldiers missing limbs were treated as heroes, although it does make sense when you think about the ways in which our society can be awful.
I also had not considered that one of the biggest dangers of a facial wound was choking on your own blood or tongue. Fitzharris focused on a few of Gillies’s clients throughout the book, and at least two of them she said had the good fortune to land facedown when they were injured, which went a long way towards saving their lives. On the other hand, that left their open wounds exposed to the mud on the battlefield. And since surgeons at the time only had a partial understanding of how germs and infections work, they stitched up their patients as fast as they could without bothering to clean the wound first. That’s why so many soldiers died of infection.
One of the reasons I was hesitant to read this book is because I was afraid of getting grossed out hearing about how men had their faces blown off. It turns out I’m not that squeamish, but I also think Fitzharris did a good job of explaining what happened without reveling in the gory details. She said in her interview that she didn’t want dwell on the gory details, but she also didn’t want to downplay what these men went through. Since I listened to the audiobook, I didn’t get to see any photos of the disfigured men Gillies treated, but if you get a hard copy, know that those images are in there. Fitzharris said she struggled with that decision because she didn’t want to make it about the gore, but she also felt she owed it to these men to make sure they’re seen, especially since most people refused to look at them when they were alive.
After the war, Gillies continued treating disfigured soldiers, but he also started selling his services to healthy, unharmed individuals who didn’t like something about their face. Gillies made the same argument in defense of his work that you hear a lot of plastic surgeons making today: if it helps someone feel better about themselves and move about in the world with more confidence, how is that providing any less value than any other type of surgery?
Oh, and he performed the first penis transplant on a transgender man, which I found fascinating. I learned so much about skin grafts and how surgeons grow the body parts they need!