Graphic Novel Update: War Wounds and Prosthetics of World War I

Wounded Veteran's Mask,
Held in place by a pair of Spectacles.

Another update in the push towards creating a rich and involved story which explores many aspects of not only the second World War, but the fallout from the first.

World War I marked a single terrible reality for many veterans- With improved accuracy with explosives and the rise of large-caliber weaponry came an unprecedented level of injury to the body. According to Fred Albee, a contemporary French surgeon, soldiers failed to comprehend the power of these weapons, and would expose themselves to fire. Those who survived their wounds were often left scarred beyond recognition for the remainder of their days.

With these wounds came not only the painful scars of memory, but a return to a society who rejected the soldiers, overwhelmed and often disgusted by the cruel disfigurements left by the war. Suddenly, every wound was a crater- every face nearly unrecognizable as belonging to that of a human being. It became the necessary duty of surgeons to pioneer plastic surgery, repairing not only flesh wounds and severed muscle, but to repair the multitude of bone structures that had been annihilated, restoring humanity to the crushed visages of countless veterans.

New cosmetic surgeries were invented, as well as the use of prosthesis. Surgeons such as Sir Harold Delf Gillies (often considered the father of plastic surgery) opened shops in England and Paris which specialized in taking plaster molds of the damaged faces, and sculpting new ones, working by photograph to impose a "restored" face to the victim. Working from techniques refined in Germany and Belgium, Gillies and his colleagues also developed skin graft surgeries. Gillies also took advantage of some 2,000 disfigured veterans of the Battle of the Somme to publish a book of photography on the horrors of facial wounds in this new War. Considered to be the first recipient of plastic surgery, former naval Officer Walter Yeo received a skin graft from Gillies, which in a series of surgical procedures crafted a new face, which albeit crude, restored Yeo to some semblance of his former self. Yeo, a British officer, had served in the Battle of Jutland in May of 1916 aboard the HMS Warspite, and had lost most of the skin on his face, including his eyelids. In stages, Yeo received grafts from other undamaged parts of his epidermis, resulting in a mask of sorts which slowly repaired the damage.

Walter Yeo after Extensive Surgery.

Alas, these grafts only served to repair skin-deep wounds- and many wounds were much, much deeper. As a result, the widespread usage of meticulously crafted masks was common- done in shops across Europe.

Perhaps the most prolific contributor to this new prosthetic trend was Bostonian artist
Anna Coleman Ladd, who applied her expertise as a sculptor to cast the delicate facial appliances. Ladd opened "The Studio for Portrait Masks," an enormous operation in Paris which serviced countless veterans of the Great War. Crafted over a period of a month or more, the masks were fashioned delicately from galvanized copper, and carefully painted to match the complexion of the veteran. For her work Ladd often received highly emotional letters of gratitude from those she had helped, many of whom stated that she had restored not only their looks, but their humanity.

The 1918 film below, "Men With Broken Faces" displays some of the process of restoring broken visages, from casting to the careful painting of the surface to match the natural skin tone of the patient. The masks were often ingeniously camouflaged, matching natural indentations on the face, or masked by accessories such as glasses to fool the eye, and preserve the dignity of the man who had lost all.

Take a look; The father of my main character will be the recipient of Gillies' and Ladd's handiwork, his facial/bodily disfigurement a cruel reminder of a war unprecedented in its brutality.


Images courtesy of www.porjati.net.