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You just know that any ‘serious’ book on the techniques of plastic surgery that has a chapter title ‘Flap Happy’ and ‘Ear Making’ is going to be a little unusual and not quite what you would expect of a medical text. Let me introduce to you the two volume set ‘The Art and Principles of Plastic Surgery’, Gillies seminal text on plastic surgery which has become available to the project for me to consult. 

Above: Inside cover.

Far from being a ‘how to’ book on facial reconstruction, the two volumes include a surprising number of personal accounts by Gilles on particular cases written in a very matter of fact way, which almost seem as though they were transcribed straight from his personal diaries.  So personal in fact that the volumes also include sketches, doodles, cartoons and collages as well as a huge amount of photographs of patients undergoing various reconstructive procedures. One of the most surprising and to be frank, downright funny images is in the section illustrating the making of a marsupial flap (a skin lined pocket). In the photograph showing the finished pocket, Gillies has actually cut out a small photograph of himself and placed it on the pocket giving the impression that he is popping out of the pocket! At one point, Gillies tries to estimate the amount of tubed pedicles he has made throughout his surgical career.’ Gillies quote Here

Above: Flap Happy.

It is images like this that speak volumes about the attitude with which Gillies dealt with his patients and the state of mind he encouraged within them. Some people might thing it disrespectful and insensitive that a sense of humour was present but I suppose if you put yourself in the shoes of Gillies, he and his surgical team will have been confronted with such an overwhelming number of casualties, a sense of humour would have been the only way in which to deal with the everyday horrors which confronted them. This sense of humour promotes optimism that was vital in helping the patients deal with their injuries.

The volumes are a collection of the life’s work of Gillies and so only a chapter or so is dedicated to the men he treated during the First World War but many individual case studies crop up throughout the volumes. Often the origins of a procedure lay in the treatment of a serviceman’s injury which forms the basis of a technique which has then been refined and adapted for other patients in later decades.

I’ve literally scratched the surface of the two volumes so expect more later.

Above: Gillies Marsupial Flap.

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