The Facemaker

Author Lindsey Fitzharris
Narrator Daniel Gillies
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Publish Date 7 June 2022
Run Time 8 hours and 14 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Disability: social aspects, First World War, History of medicine, History of science, History: specific events and topics, Plastic and reconstructive surgery, Popular science.

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What to expect

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From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind's military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. The war caused carnage on an industrial scale, and the nature of trench warfare meant that thousands sustained facial injuries. In The Facemaker, award-winning historian Lindsey Fitzharris tells the true story of the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to restoring the faces of a brutalized generation.

Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, established one of the world's first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of facial differences, Gillies restored not just faces, but identities and spirits.

The Facemaker places Gillies's ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine and art can merge, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

© Lindsey Fitzharris 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

In this fascinating book, Fitzharris reminds us there is nothing superficial about plastic surgery’s ability to heal minds as well as bodies. Five stars

Mail on Sunday

Scholarly yet deeply moving… This is a fascinating book about a remarkable man, and of how teamwork is such an important part of good surgery. Despite the grim subject matter, it is a deeply moving and uplifting story

New Statesman

Careful… sensitive… [Fitzharris] 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… Fitzharris constructs a variegated and tender account of the First World War, its brutality and its narratives of human redemption… 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

TLS

The Facemaker is an engaging biography of a masterful surgeon as well as a heartening account of medical progress

Economist

Meticulously researched… Five stars

Telegraph

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

Financial Times

Engrossing… Fitzharris presents an intensely moving and hugely enjoyable story about a remarkable medical pioneer and the men he remade

Guardian

A skilled storyteller, Fitzharris takes the reader back to the front, making them trudge and slide through mud filled with missing limbs to find the people who stagger into Gillies’s casebooks… Properly contextualised, these faces become not objects of horror or surgery, as they have been all too often used, but pathways into understanding what it is to lose a face, and with it, not only the ability to eat, drink and breathe, but also social acceptance and love

The Lancet

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

The Times

Out of war’s most awful wounds, out of gore and terror and pain, Lindsey Fitzharris has – like Sir Harold Gillies himself – crafted something inspiring and downright miraculous. I cannot imagine the sweat and sleuthing and doggedness that went into gathering the details and building the narratives of these men’s struggles. This book is riveting. It is gruesome but it is also uplifting. For as much as there is blood and bone and pus in these pages, there is heart. As Fitzharris shows us, the scalpel is mightier than the grenade, and the pen is mightiest of all. What a triumph this book is

Mary Roach

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