The Surgeon Who Rebuilt the Broken Faces of WWI
Premieres Wed 21 Oct · 12:00 ET
The Surgeon Who Rebuilt the Broken Faces of WWIJoin the list below and we'll send it the day it's out.
In the First World War, trench warfare left thousands of soldiers without faces. An ear, nose and throat surgeon from New Zealand, Harold Gillies, built a hospital just for faces — and laid the foundations of modern plastic and reconstructive surgery. Plus: what surgeons can do today.
Every Then vs Now episode ends with what a surgeon would do today.
Chapters
- 0:00A soldier without a face
- 0:47The artillery war
- 1:54Saving lives, not faces
- 2:12Gillies meets a dentist
- 3:01Aldershot: the first facial unit
- 3:17The first day of the Somme
- 3:47No textbooks: photographs and pastels
- 4:44Quick pause: the quiz
- 5:14Sidcup: a hospital built for faces
- 5:42The blue benches
- 6:06Walter Yeo and the tubed pedicle
- 7:41The Tin Noses Shop
- 8:19Then vs Now: rebuilding a face today
- 10:31What a war really breaks
- 10:49Next episode
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Sources
Facts were checked against multiple sources. Key references (full list in the pinned comment on YouTube):
- Imperial War Museums — What was the Battle of the Somme
- Bamji 2019, Hektoen International — Outcomes from the Queen's Hospital, Sidcup
- BAPRAS — Harold Delf Gillies and the origins of modern plastic surgery of the face
- National Army Museum — The birth of plastic surgery
- Embryo Project Encyclopedia (ASU) — Harold Delf Gillies (1882–1960)
- Our Health Museum (NZ) — Harold Gillies
- Smithsonian Magazine — Faces of War
- History Hit — How World War One invented modern plastic surgery
- Biernoff S. Flesh Poems: Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery. Visual Culture in Britain (2010)
- Marck K. et al. The tubed pedicle flap centennial. Eur J Plast Surg (2017)
- Western Front Association — British medical casualties on the Western Front, part 2
- Goldsmiths, University of London — The forgotten faces of WW1
- Frontiers in Oncology (2021) — Mandibular reconstruction with fibula flap and dental implants using virtual planning
- Craniofacial implant-retained prostheses (review, PMC)
- Guinness World Records — First successful partial face transplant
Some visuals are illustrations or reconstructions. For education only — not medical or legal advice.