Project Facade: About

• Anna Coleman Ladd and Francis Derwent Wood
• Dr Andrew Bamji
• Intratracheal anaesthesia
• Sir Archibald McIndoe, Rainsford Mowlem and the Guinea Pig Club
• The Gillies Archive

A number of artists were associated with the production of facial prostheses for servicemen whose injuries were so severe that they required partial masks to give the appearance of a ‘complete face’.

Coming soon…

In addition to the innovations in facial surgery pioneered under Harold Gillies at the Queen’s Hospital Sidcup, there were considerable advances in the administering of anaesthetics. It was said at the time that patients feared the anaesthetist’s bottle of chloroform almost as much as the surgeon’s knife. 

On the outbreak of World War Two, Harold Gillies and his colleague Tommy Kilner were joined by surgeons Archibald McIndoe, (who was a cousin of Gillies) and Rainsford Mowlem. The re-opening of Sidcup was mooted, but dismissed as at risk from bombing, and the plastic surgery service was split up on service lines. 

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.