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

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

Ocular desires : sight and embodiment in the middle ages

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. Access is restricted indefinitely

Sharing music and culture through singing in Australia

This article discusses the notion of sharing music and culture as an effective platform to celebrate diversity in Melbourne, Australia. My research project &lsquo;Celebrating Music Making and Finding Meaning&rsquo; investigates and illustrates a context of diversity, one that promotes respect in a multicultural society sharing music and culture of a minority group. In 2007, I interviewed members of the South African choir in Melbourne; here I report on some data regarding why members sing in the choir, what are their understandings of a so-called South African identity and what they would like to share with the wider Australian community. I present some theoretical perspectives focusing on the notion of cultural and musical identity within a multicultural society. Such findings may have similar implications for other multicultural educational settings exploring the possibilities of valuing cultural diversity and making music across ages through a choir where difference can be shared and celebrated.<br /

Medical archives and digital culture

When BioShock was released in August 2007, reviewers praised the moral complexities of the narrative and the game’s dystopian vision of what Ayn Rand dubbed the “virtue of selfishness.” What critics overlooked was the extent to which the disturbingly realistic artwork and musical score relied on found images and sound, including a recording of distressed breathing from a physician’s website, and digitized First World War medical photographs of soldiers with facial injuries. This article examines the implications of these acts of appropriation from a range of critical perspectives including Susan Sontag’s commentary on the representation of suffering; recent literature on the ethics of computer games; and an online discussion forum in which players of BioShock discuss the moral “grey areas” of the game

‘Elegant’ Surgery: The Beauty of Clinical Expertise

Reflecting on his life as a neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh describes the experience that set him out on his career: observing an operation on an aneurysm in the brain. ‘The operation was elegant, dangerous and full of profound meaning. What could be finer, I thought, than to be a neurosurgeon?’1 Approaching the theme of this collection — beauty in relation to notions of recovery — from my perspective as a clinician, I kept coming back to the word that is, as here, surprisingly in common use by surgeons to refer to technical work that they admire: ‘elegance’. I wondered where it came from, what it means for surgery to be ‘elegant’, why the language of aesthetics is used for technical processes. I was also interested in what this word says about the doctor who is described as exercising ‘elegant’ skills, and about the implications of this descriptor for the relationship between clinician and the patient. There is a coolness about the word ‘elegance’, and I have previously written with others about the idea of ‘cool intimacy’ in relation to clinical examination.2 Elegance may be important to the surgeon but not necessarily to the patient. For the patient what matters for recovery is that the surgery is effective. I wondered whether, in using this word in relation to surgical procedures, most surgeons were not necessarily thinking of effectiveness but more of a certain knacky skill or ingenious way of doing something