Theatres of surgery: the cultural pre-history of the face transplant

The first facial transplant, using a donor’s nose, chin and mouth, was performed on Isabelle Dinoire in France in 2005, but the idea of removing or replacing the face – either with a mask, or with a living face – has been around for much longer. This article explores the cultural pre-history of face transplantation: its speculative existence in legend, literature and film before it became a medical possibility at the beginning of the twenty-first century. One of the questions posed here is: how (and for what purpose) do medical ‘firsts’ like Dinoire’s surgery acquire a history? The article begins by considering the uses of the past by transplant surgeons themselves, and by those who are concerned about the ethical or psychological implications of organ and face transplantation. Having considered these different investments in the past – one emphasising medical progress, the other highlighting enduring anxieties about medical experimentation – we turn to the first cinematic portrayal of face transplantation, in Georges Franju’s horror classic Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959). An exploration of Franju’s sources suggests a more complicated relationship between medical innovations and their cultural contexts and highlights the changing significance of the face as a site of medical and aesthetic intervention

Flesh Poems: Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery

This article focuses on Henry Tonks’ pastel studies of wounded First World War servicemen before, after, and during facial surgery. Viewed alongside archival photographs of the same patients from the Cambridge Hospital at Aldershot and The Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup, Tonks’ drawings disturb the conventions both of medical illustration and portraiture: they are discussed here in relation to the visual cultures of modern medicine (in particular nineteenth and twentieth-century traditions of medical illustration and photography) and the artist’s own thoughts on artistic objectivity and beauty. For Tonks, good drawing was tactile: without this sensibility and skill, he believed, the draughtsman’s art was like playing a piano without hearing the notes. In light of Tonks’ wartime collaboration with the surgeon Harold Gillies this paper explores the hypothesis that the history of surgery – and to some extent the history of medical representation – is a history of touch as much as a product of visual practices and conventions

The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain

During the First World War, the horror of facial mutilation was evoked in journalism, poems, memoirs and fiction; but in Britain it was almost never represented visually outside the professional contexts of clinical medicine and medical history. This article asks why, and offers an account of British visual culture in which visual anxiety and aversion are of central importance. By comparing the rhetoric of disfigurement to the parallel treatment of amputees, an asymmetrical picture emerges in which the ‘worst loss of all’—the loss of one's face—is perceived as a loss of humanity. The only hope was surgery or, if that failed, prosthetic repair: innovations that were often wildly exaggerated in the popular press. Francis Derwent Wood was one of several sculptors whose technical skill and artistic ‘wizardry’ played a part in the improvised reconstruction of identity and humanity

Let\u27s Talk Protecting Endangered Species

The Trump Administration recently changed Endangered Species Act regulations affecting how species are removed from endangered status and streamlining permits for the oil and gas and ranching industries. Environmentalists say the rules weaken protections. How could the new rules change industry and conservation in New Mexico

‘An uglier duckling than before’: Reclaiming agency and visibility amongst facially-wounded ex-servicemen in Britain after the First World War

In total, 60,500 British soldiers were wounded in the head or eyes during the First World War. Despite these numbers facially-wounded ex-servicemen, in particular their post-war experiences, are largely overlooked in the social history of the conflict. Whilst part of a wider constituency of war-wounded veterans, owing to the value ascribed to the face in terms of personal identity and socio-economic values, disfigured veterans were excluded from the discourse of masculine heroism in which other war wounds were framed. Narratives of facial injury emphasised despairing passivity, which acted to emasculate and ‘other’ the facially-wounded. How accurately though does this reflect their lived experiences? Using first-hand testimony from facially-injured ex-servicemen this article challenges the representation of the disfigured veteran as passive, arguing that men exercised agency through their self-representations and behavioural responses. Drawing on normative conceptions of masculinity, and on idealised images of war-wounded veterans, facially-wounded ex-servicemen constructed counter-narratives of their emotional response to facial injury which emphasised conformity to these ideals. The conceptualisation of disfigurements as war wounds, and the high cultural status of the war-disabled, allowed facially-wounded ex-servicemen to reclaim the masculine status which they were denied in popular representations, and to assert their right to social visibility in post-war Britain

Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917-27

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.The return of facially disfigured men from the trenches of World War One occasioned a muted public reaction in the US. However, this article will show that burgeoning discourses concerning plastic surgery in the US also generated a significant reaction in the popular press, and that these were reflected, too, in several feature films dealing with facial surgery on disfigured veterans. Though several of these films depicted miraculous transformations occasioned by the surgeons, Robert Florey’s 1927 film, Face Value, focused on an American veteran with facial scarring that could not be repaired. The article will argue that this film drew strongly upon the increasingly prominent public presence of the gueules cassées in the US during 1926 and 1927. Depicting gueules cassées and their facial injuries prominently in several scenes, the film brought to attention difficult questions concerning the futures of such men, which the US media had hitherto rarely addressed

A necessary humanity

Book synopsis: Written to coincide with the War, Art and Surgery exhibitions at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, this accompanying book will provide the first full illustrated catalogue of the Royal College of Surgeons collection of works by Tonks and artwork created by Midgley for the exhibition - with short essays and testimonies from personnel involved

The face of war

Book synopsis: Ugliness is very much alive in the history of art. From ritual invocations of mythic monsters to the scare tactics of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, the cabinet of curiosities to the identity politics of today, the ugly has been every bit as active as beauty, and often much more of a reality... why then has it been so neglected. This book seeks to remedy this oversight through both broad theoretical reflection and concrete case studies of ugliness in various historical and cultural contexts. The protagonists range from cooks to psychoanalysts, the object, from war prostheses to plates of asparagus, on a world stage stretching from ancient Athens to Singapore today. Drawing across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, the writers illuminated why ugliness, associated over the millennia with negative categories ranging from sin and stupidity to triviality and boredom, remains central to art and cultural practice

Living with disfigurement in early Medieval Europe

Review of: Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe, Patricia Skinner. London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, ISBN: 978-1349950737; 294pp.; Price: £15.7