Sir Harold Gillies

Extract from a script by Sir Eric Gillies describing the development of plastic surgery in the First World War for the Health Pavilion at the Festival of Britain 1951, (Catalogue ref: WORK 25/23)

Transcript

Script for the Health Pavilion on

PLASTIC SURGERY-by SIR HAROLD GILLIES

Before World War I Plastic Surgery was scarcely practiced as a speciality. Cases were indeed treated and have been so since the earliest times of Vedic India. Mostly the work was undertaken by whatever surgeon or specialist received the case, although there were a few outstanding exceptions. But it needed the impetus of the face mutilations of the Battle of the Somme, 2,000 in ten days, the advantages of team work, of improved asepsis, and above all of general anaesthesia, to establish the beginnings of a separate speciality treating all kinds of superficial mutilations or defects of any part of the body.

In 1917-18, 11,000 facial injury cases went through the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, and treating them were British Canadian, Australian and New Zealand teams of surgeons and dental surgeons. The place was internationally renowned and visited by many, including King George V and Queen Mary. The United States’ teams also paid a long visit. Sidcup can with truth claim to be the birthplace of modern plastic surgery.

At the end of the war the infant would have died had it not been for the continued interest and devotion of Gillies and Kilner. A long battle of “showing the flag” in the civil adaptation of Plastic Surgery  was rewarded by a department of Plastic Surgery in the L.C.C. Medical Services in about 1926, and later St Bartholomew’s in 1930 and St Thomas’s in 1934 appointed a Plastic Surgeon to their staffs.

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