Project Facade: About

• Bioactive© glass facial implants
• Sir Archibald McIndoe, Rainsford Mowlem and the Guinea Pig Club
• Sir Harold Delf Gillies
• The Gallipoli Front
• The Gillies Archive

The material Bioactive glass was invented by American Professor Larry Hench during the Vietnam War. Tasked by the US Government to develop a material which could be used to repair large bone injuries suffered by Servicemen during the war, Professor Hench used silica (glass) as a carried or host material which could be combined with other ingredients such as calcium in a powdered form to pack between bone fragments to fuse shattered bones.

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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. 

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New Zealander Sir Harold Delf Gillies is widely accepted as the Father of modern day facial reconstruction. Gillies was sent to France by the Red Cross, and found himself assisting a French-American dentist, Valadier at Wimereux, near Boulogne, Seeking further inspiration from surgeon Hippolyte Morestin at the Val-de-Grâce Military Hospital near Paris, otolaryngologist Gillies persuaded Sir Arbuthnot Lane, head of surgery for the British Army, to allow him a ward specifically for the treatment of facial injuries at the Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot. more...

Winston Churchill is widely credited as the man who committed British, French and - above all - untested Australian and New Zealand forces to the ill-fated campaign to seize control of the Dardanelles Straits and western Turkey.  Indeed, although it was Churchill’s drive and aggressiveness - not to mention cunning - which resulted in the campaign actually taking place, the notion of capturing the Turkish Dardanelles Straits had long been given consideration. more...

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. 

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