I’m not sure where I first heard
about Harold Gillies. It may have been through
a podcast, or maybe in a book I was reading since we’re in the midst of the
World War One centenary. I don’t really
know. But, I remembered him because what
he did really stuck with me. And it
turns out he kept doing cool stuff after the First World War!
Harold Delf Gillies was born on June 17,
1882 in Dunedin, New Zealand, the youngest of Robert and Emily Gillies’ eight
children. Robert was a Member of
Parliament and a businessman, but died when Harold was only four. Because of his positions, though, Robert left
his family well taken care of. Harold
followed his brothers to prep school in England, and then to Wanganui College
back in New Zealand. Harold was a
skilled artist and throughout school, he was also good at sports, including
cricket, golf, and rowing. After
Wanganui, Harold went to Caius College at Cambridge, back in England, and won
ribbons for rowing, “despite a stiff elbow sustained sliding down the banisters
at home as a child” (1).
At Cambridge Harold studied medicine
and became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1910, specializing in
ear, nose, and throat surgery. When the
First World War broke out, Harold decided to join the Red Cross rather than
waiting to be drafted. In 1915 he joined
the Royal Army Medical Corps and went to Wimereux in France. In France Harold met Charles Auguste
Valadier, a French dentist, and Bob Roberts, an American dental surgeon. Roberts lent Harold a German book about jaw
and mouth surgery. Valadier “was not
allowed to operate unsupervised but was attempting to develop jaw repair work”
(2). Valadier was trying early skin
grafts on his patients.
We have to go off on a little bit of
a tangent here for a minute and talk about skin grafts and early facial
surgeries. In India, they had been doing
a sort of rhinoplasty for centuries, using “crescent shaped flaps of skin …
drawn from patients’ foreheads and fashioned into substitute noses” (3). In the nineteenth century, the French and the
Germans “had developed a technique whereby skin could be transferred from one
part of the body to another,” “’but appearance was of secondary importance’” (4). This is probably what was in the book Roberts
lent Harold. Harold saw all this and
wanted to make the person look normal, or even better than they looked before.
Harold left Wimereux for Paris to
try and meet Hippolyte Morestin, a renowned surgeon. Morestin had also done similar surgeries,
having removed a tumor on a face and covering it with jaw skin from the patient
(5). After meeting Morestin, Harold
returned to England to try and convince “the army’s chief surgeon, [William]
Arbuthnot-Lane, that a facial injury ward should be established at the
Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot” (6).
This ward was quickly outgrown and a new hospital just for this purpose
was opened at Sidcup, becoming Queen Mary’s Hospital later on.
Harold’s artistic abilities played
into how he viewed himself as a surgeon, and surgeons in general. As mentioned earlier, Harold wanted to make
his patients look at least as good as they did before their injuries. He saw facial reconstructive surgeons as a
type of artist and plastic surgery as “a strange new art” (7). In order to have the results he wanted,
Harold came up with a number of new techniques for facial surgeries.
First, Harold made sure to visualize
how he wanted the person to look in the end.
He took the time to make drawings on paper, worked with wax, or even
made plaster models of his patients.
Secondly, Harold made sure his teams included anyone he could possibly
need. He understood the importance of
having a dental surgeon on hand since so much of the facial structure is
related to the mouth and jaw. Thirdly, “because
surgery on damaged faces was impossible when a mask was used to anaesthetise
the patient, he encouraged anaesthetists to develop alternative techniques,
such as using a tube in the trachea” (8).
Harold was also one of the first, if not the first, to document the
entire process. Henry Tonks, a surgeon
and painter, helped Harold document both “pre- and post-facial reconstruction
cases” (9).
After the Somme (1916), Harold and
his team at Aldershot helped over two thousand men with jaw and facial
mutilations (10). Despite everything he
did during World War One, and his fame now for his advancements, “his work
during the First World War went largely unnoticed” (11). Harold was recognized by other countries for
his work before he was recognized in England.
In the early 1920s Harold went to
Copenhagen “to treat a number of Danish naval officers and men who had been
severely burned in an accident” (12) when a Royal Danish Navy ship
exploded. The Danish government decorated
Harold for his services. Finally, in
June 1930, Harold was knighted for his services to England; Arbuthnot-Lane said
“Better late than never” (13).
After World War One, Harold opened a
private practice for surgery, gave lectures, taught, and promoted his new
techniques. In 1920 his first book, Plastic Surgery of the Face, was
published. (He would also co-author 1957’s
The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery.) In 1930, Harold invited his cousin, Archibald
McIndoe, to join his practice; McIndoe became well-known for plastic surgery as
well, making new advances during the Second World War. In 1938, Harold and his practice began
correcting breast abnormalities, going back to Harold’s wanting to make people
look as good or better than they had been.
During World War Two, Harold was called on to be a
consultant for the Minister of Health, the Royal Air Force, and the Admiralty;
he helped organize plastic surgery units across the country, and trained many
Commonwealth doctors in plastic surgery.
After the war, in 1946, Harold was “elected foundation president of the
British Association of Plastic Surgeons; he later became honorary president of
the International Society of Plastic Surgeons” (14). In 1948, Norway decorated Harold for his work
during World War Two. He was also made
an “honorary fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, of the
American College of Surgeons and of the Royal Society of Medicine, London” (15).
In 1946, Harold and a colleague performed “one of the first
sex reassignment surgery from female to male on Michael Dillon” (16). In 1951, they performed a male to female sex reassignment
surgery; their way of performing this surgery became standard for the next
forty years.
Going back a bit, for his personal life, on November 9,
1911, Harold married Kathleen Margaret Jackson in London. They had four children. Their oldest son, John, became a RAF pilot
during World War Two and spent much of the war as a POW. Their youngest son, Michael, also became a
doctor. Harold had been good at sports
while he was in school, but continued on, becoming a champion golfer. He also continued with his art, exhibiting at
Foyale’s Art Gallery in London in 1948.
In May 1957, Kathleen died, and in November of that year,
Harold married Marjorie Ethel Clayton, who had been his surgical
assistant. In August 1960, while
operating on the leg of an 18-year-old girl, Harold suffered a “slight cerebral
thrombosis” (17). On September 10, 1960,
Harold died at The London Clinic in Marylebone.
Despite his fame and having earned around £30,000 a year between the
wars, he only left £21,161 upon his death.
To finish I’m going to quote at length from Sir Heneage Ogilvie, a renowned
British surgeon, who wrote in 1962:
“During my life I have only known three surgeons who were
undoubtedly first-class. They were
Geoffery Jeferson, Harold Gillies and Russell Brock. Apart from Arbuthnot Lane, who was before my
time, they are the only men in Europe or America who have taken a branch of
surgery and by their own effort, by their leadership, their research and
craftsmanship, have left it far higher than they found it. To say that of Gillies is an understatement:
he invented plastic surgery. There was no
plastic surgery before he came.
Everything since then, no matter whose name be attached to it, was
started by Gillies, perfected by him and handed on by him to lesser men, who
have often claimed it as their own” (18).
