The facemaker of World War 1: how Harold Gillies gave shattered soldiers a new self

India Today

17-06-2025

Today, when we hear the words 'plastic surgery,' it often conjures images of celebrities fine-tuning their looks under bright Hollywood lights. But long before it was about aesthetic tweaks, it was about survival -- about restoring identity to those whose faces had been taken by war or fire or accidents.The trenches of the First World War unleashed a kind of devastation few could have imagined. Men returned to Britain with their jaws blown off, noses missing, eyes sealed shut -- shells of their former selves.advertisementBut at Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot, England, a young surgeon from New Zealand saw something others didn't.
He looked beyond the torn skin and shattered bones and asked a different kind of question: what if surgery could bring not just flesh, but identity, back to life?FROM DUNEDIN DREAMER TO SURGICAL PIONEEROn June 17, 1882, Harold Delf Gillies was born into a world of rhetoric and renaissance. His father was a Member of Parliament in Dunedin, NewZealand, and his mother was related to the whimsical poet Edward Lear.At Whanganui Collegiate, young Gillies excelled in medicine, but also cricket and golf. Those qualities would shape his later life: physical precision mixed with a creative spark.In England, he read medicine at Cambridge's Gonville and Caius, where he rowed in the 1904 Boat Race and played golf for England. Then came London and St.Bartholomew's Hospital, where he trained in ENT.advertisementBy 1911, he'd married Kathleen Margaret Jackson, and shortly after, World War I broke out.
Group photo at Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup in 1917, including Harold Gillies, William Kelsey Fry and Henry Tonks (1917) (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
A WAR SCULPTED A NEW VISIONHe arrived on the Western Front in 1915, a 32-year-old doctor with tools, questions, and a quiet kind of vision.Under French surgeon Hippolyte Morestin, Harold Gillies watched as damaged jaws were covered using pieces of skin from other parts of the body. The sight moved him deeply.Back in London, he convinced the military to let him create a special ward at Aldershot, dedicated entirely to soldiers with facial injuries.Soon, he was bringing wounded men from the front lines to England -- not just to fix their wounds, but to help them rebuild their sense of self.That first ward would grow. By 1917, the Queen's Hospital (later renamed Queen Mary's Hospital) opened in Sidcup, England, a place where medicine met imagination.Inside, Gillies assembled a team of surgeons, dentists, anaesthetists, and artists -- all working in harmony to develop new ways of healing. They used skin grafts layered like building blocks, and carefully shaped pieces of tissue to rebuild faces feature by feature.REINVENTING SURGERY, REBUILDING FACESadvertisementThe most famous of Gillies' breakthroughs was something that, on paper, sounded bizarre: the 'tubed pedicle flap.'In an era before antibiotics, open wounds were a dangerous gamble. So Gillies came up with a solution -- shaping skin into tubes while keeping one end attached to the body, so it stayed alive.This living skin was slowly moved, bit by bit, across the face until it reached the damaged area. It looked strange, but it worked.Over 8,000 soldiers were treated using this method at Sidcup. For many, it gave them something beyond survival -- it gave them their face back.
Walter Yeo, the first person to receive plastic surgery, before (left) and after (right) skin flap surgery performed by Sir Harold Delf Gillies in 1917. The pictures of Walter's face before the surgery are blurry and hard to come by. In the tragic accident he was recorded as having lost both his upper and lower eyelids. The surgery was some of the first to use a skin flap from an unaffected area of the body and paved the way for a sudden rash of improvements in this field. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
advertisementGillies planned every operation with care. He drew sketches on envelopes and scrap paper, built wax masks and plaster moulds to imagine how a face could be put back together.'Use your eyes first, dirty fingers later,' he would say. His surgery wasn't just skill -- it was craft.A CUP OF COLOUR AND A STREAK OF HUMOURHe wasn't always serious. Gillies liked mischief as much as medicine. He often lit up a Cuban cigar while testing colours in his spectrometer, a tool used for analysing chemical elements, claiming it helped him check lithium lines. It probably also amused him.Outside the operating theatre, Gillies was a champion golfer, earning his Blue at Cambridge and competing in national tournaments -- even tweaking surgical tools to suit his golfer's grip. He was widely regarded in the early 1920s as one of the finest amateur golfers in England.
Harold Gillies was one of the best amateur golfers in England (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
advertisementAnd then there was 'Dr Scroggie from South Africa' -- a persona he created for fun. Dressed in a fake beard and wig, Gillies once walked into his own home pretending to be a visiting doctor. He even fooled his valet.His colleagues roared with laughter when they realised the trick -- it was the kind of prank that became legend in his circle.His personal life had its own chapters. He married Kathleen Jackson and had children, but lost her in 1957. Later that year, he married Marjorie Clayton, his assistant and close companion for years.Gillies lived for people, progress, and humour -- sometimes all in one operating theatre.BEYOND WAR: A NEW ERA IN SURGERYAfter 1918, Gillies sowed his seeds in civilian soil. His book Plastic Surgery of the Face (1920) became the cornerstone of modern surgery. He founded units around the world, training others like Archibald McIndoe and Rainsford Mowlem.advertisementEven in WWII, his influence helped build effective plastic surgery teams. In 1946 he performed one of the first female-to-male affirming surgeries (MichaelDillon) and in 1951 worked with gender pioneering RobertaCowell.
Dr. Gillis, who operated on the Danish sailors injured in the geyser explosion (2nd from the left) (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
When asked why, he replied simply: 'If it gives real happiness, that is the most any medicine can give.'A DOCTOR'S LAST ACTGillies worked nearly to the end. He died on September 10, 1960, days after a stroke, still amid a life of purpose and practice.He left no fortune, but his real legacy lives on in faces once lost.Plastic surgery may now conjure cosmetic bowls on screens. But Gillies reminded the world it was always about function, dignity, reclaiming identity.He used art to heal a person's soul as well as their skin. He proved science can be creative. And he offered hope where despair once reigned.