Saturday, January 01, 2005
The Gillies Archive
A series of coincidences resulted in the discovery of a remarkable collection of material that documents the development of plastic surgery at the beginning of the 20th Century. Each Dominion detachment removed its records after the war; it was assumed that the British records had been donated to the Royal College of Surgeons and destroyed when the College was bombed in the Second War.
The New Zealand records (the Macalister Archive) resurfaced when rescued by Sandy Macalister, Professor of Oral Surgery at the Dental School in Dunedin from imminent destruction, and he generously donated them to Queen Mary’s Hospital in 1989. After publication of a brief article about these in 1993, the British records (the Gillies Archive) emerged from hiding at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton, where they had languished, almost untouched, since 1925. They include many cases illustrated by Gillies in his seminal textbook, “Plastic Surgery of the Face”, published in 1920. Altogether the archives contain over 2500 records. Most of the case notes are in their original folders and contain notes, photographs, diagrams and X-ray photographs. The New Zealand records also contain a series of 98 watercolours and a life-sized wax model illustrating surgical techniques.
The Australian section’s records are preserved in the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in Melbourne and the U.S. section at Harvard Medical Library. The Canadian records have disappeared.
Queen’s Hospital patients of this era were almost exclusively servicemen. Most were soldiers, with a smaller number of Navy and Flying Corps personnel, some of whom had suffered severe burns. The records include rank, number, regiment and date of wounding so the action in which they were wounded can often be identified. The Gillies Archives are probably the most important and complete collection of war surgery records of their age in the world.
