Sir Harold Gillies The Father of Modern Plastic Surgery
- Daniel Holland
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
In the mud and chaos of the First World War, some of the most horrific injuries weren’t just broken bones or missing limbs, they were wounds to the face. A generation of young men returned home with shattered jaws, missing noses, and scars that left them unrecognisable even to their families. In Britain, they became known as the “loneliest Tommies.” Many of them avoided leaving hospital grounds altogether, afraid of how the public would react. When they did venture out, they were instructed to sit on bright blue benches so passers-by could avoid them.
But one man looked at those faces and saw more than ruin. Sir Harold Gillies, a New Zealand-born surgeon with an artistic eye, believed he could give these men not just their features back, but also their dignity. Over the course of his career, he pioneered techniques that became the foundation of modern plastic surgery, performing more than 11,000 operations on over 5,000 patients between 1917 and 1925. His story is both one of surgical brilliance and deep humanity.
The Horror of World War I Facial Injuries
World War I was unlike any conflict before it. Trench warfare created brutal conditions where soldiers risked everything just by raising their heads above the parapet. As one surgeon later grumbled: “They seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of machine-gun bullets.”
With machine guns, high-velocity rifles, and exploding shells, injuries to the face were more common than in any earlier war. By the time the fighting ended, around 280,000 soldiers returned home with devastating facial injuries. The psychological toll was immense. Losing a limb was considered heroic. Losing a face, as medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris has put it, made you “a monster.”
One soldier, John Glubb, later famous as “Glubb Pasha”, recalled the day in 1917 when a shell fragment tore through his face. “The floodgates in my neck seemed to burst,” he said. “And the blood poured out in torrents.” For weeks he believed he had a chicken bone lodged in his mouth. In reality, it was half of his jaw, detached and floating.
The reactions these men received when they returned to civilian life were brutal. Inspector Robert Tait McKenzie, who visited convalescent hospitals during the war, noted that disfigured soldiers often sank into “despondency, melancholia, leading, in some cases, even to suicide.” The loneliness was crushing. This was the world Harold Gillies stepped into.
Early Life of Harold Gillies
Harold Delf Gillies was born on 17 June 1882 in Dunedin, New Zealand. His father, Robert Gillies, was a Member of Parliament in Otago, and his family background was comfortable. From a young age,
Harold showed two passions that would define his career: a talent for art and a love of medicine.
He studied medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he also excelled in sport. Despite a stiff elbow from a childhood accident, the result of sliding down a bannister, he became a “blue” in both rowing and golf, competing in the 1904 Boat Race and later representing England in amateur golf. Friends noted his eye for aesthetics, a quality that would later help him shape and rebuild faces with remarkable skill.
Gillies went on to train at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, where he won the Luther Holden Research Scholarship in 1910. He was ambitious, scientifically curious, and, unusually for a surgeon, gifted with a painter’s sense of proportion. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Gillies volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps, unaware that his career, and surgical history, was about to change forever.
Inspiration from the Frontlines
Gillies was first posted to Wimereux, near Boulogne in France, where he encountered French-American dentist Auguste Charles Valadier. Valadier was experimenting with jaw repairs, but as he wasn’t a licensed surgeon, he worked under supervision. Gillies was fascinated by the possibilities.
He then travelled to Paris to meet Hippolyte Morestin, a pioneering French oral surgeon. Gillies watched Morestin remove a tumour from a patient’s face, then cover the wound with skin taken from the jaw. It was a revelation. “This was a strange new art,” Gillies would later recall, and he immediately set his sights on mastering it.
Returning to England, Gillies persuaded Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, the army’s chief surgeon, that Britain needed a dedicated facial injury ward. The existing facilities were hopelessly inadequate. By June 1917, thanks to Gillies’ persistence, The Queen’s Hospital at Sidcup opened its doors. It was the first hospital in the world dedicated entirely to reconstructive surgery.
The Queen’s Hospital at Sidcup
The Queen’s Hospital was revolutionary. With more than 1,000 beds, it became the epicentre of experimental surgery. Gillies and his colleagues developed new techniques at a frantic pace, because they had no other choice.
As Fitzharris notes in The Facemaker: “Gillies is really operating without a net. He doesn’t have anybody teaching him how to do this. He’s really got to make this up.”
He pioneered skin grafts that used “tubed pedicles,” where skin was partially detached, rolled into a tube to keep its blood supply, and then gradually stretched or rotated onto the wounded area. He avoided artificial implants, instead preferring to rebuild faces with the patient’s own skin, cartilage, or bone, often harvested from ribs or thighs. The results were sometimes rudimentary by today’s standards, but at the time they were miraculous.
Gillies also understood the psychological trauma of disfigurement. In some wards, mirrors were banned to prevent soldiers from seeing themselves too soon. Mask makers, dental surgeons, and X-ray technicians worked alongside him. Restoring function was crucial, but Gillies insisted that aesthetics mattered too. His patients deserved to eat, drink, and speak, but they also deserved to walk down the street without strangers recoiling.
Recognition and Wider Impact
By the end of the war in 1918, Gillies and his team had performed thousands of operations. Between 1917 and 1925, more than 11,000 procedures were carried out at Sidcup on over 5,000 men. Walter Yeo, a sailor wounded at the Battle of Jutland, is often cited as one of the first patients to undergo Gillies’ plastic surgery techniques.
For his extraordinary services, Gillies was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1919, and a Commander the following year. In 1930, he was knighted. His work at Sidcup didn’t just change faces, it changed lives, setting the standard for reconstructive surgery worldwide.
Between the wars, Gillies ran a successful private practice and trained the next generation of surgeons, including his cousin Archibald McIndoe, who would later become famous for treating burned airmen during World War II.
World War II and Beyond
When World War II erupted, Gillies once again returned to service, this time as a consultant to the Ministry of Health, the RAF, and the Admiralty. He established plastic surgery units across Britain and inspired colleagues such as Stewart Harrison, who set up the Wexham Park Hospital unit in Berkshire.
Even outside wartime, Gillies never slowed down. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became one of the first surgeons to perform gender-affirming surgeries. In 1946, he and a colleague operated on Michael Dillon, the world’s first female-to-male trans man to undergo phalloplasty. In 1951, Gillies operated on Roberta Cowell, a former RAF pilot and racing driver, performing one of the first male-to-female surgeries using techniques that would remain standard for decades. Reflecting on this work, Gillies simply said: “If it gives real happiness, that is the most that any surgeon or medicine can give.”
A Life of Dedication
Sir Harold Gillies remained committed to his patients until the very end. On 3 August 1960, at the age of 78, he suffered a cerebral thrombosis while performing surgery on the damaged leg of an 18-year-old girl. He died a few weeks later, on 10 September 1960, at The London Clinic. Despite earning a considerable income during his career, he left a modest estate, a sign, perhaps, of a life devoted less to wealth than to his craft.
Gillies left behind a family, including four children. His eldest son John was a Spitfire pilot shot down in 1940, spending the war as a prisoner of the Germans. His youngest son Michael followed him into medicine. Generations later, his descendant, actor Daniel Gillies, would find fame in television and film.
In his personal life, Gillies was also an accomplished golfer, competing in amateur tournaments for decades and winning the President’s Putter in 1925. But it is for his medical artistry that he is remembered.
Legacy
Today, Sir Harold Gillies is widely recognised as the father of modern plastic surgery. His innovations during World War I transformed a crude, experimental practice into a respected medical discipline. He gave faces back to those who had lost them, and in doing so, he gave lives back to men who might otherwise have been forgotten on the margins of society.
His pioneering work laid the foundation for everything from reconstructive jaw surgery to cosmetic rhinoplasty, from burn treatments to gender-affirming procedures. More importantly, he taught future generations of surgeons that medicine is not only about survival, but about dignity, identity, and humanity.
As Gillies himself once put it: “This was a strange new art… we were suddenly asked to produce half a face.” Against impossible odds, he did just that — thousands of times.
Sources
Fitzharris, Lindsey. The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.
National Army Museum, London: https://www.nam.ac.uk
NPR Interview with Lindsey Fitzharris: https://www.npr.org
Queen Mary’s Hospital History: https://www.qmheritage.com
Royal College of Surgeons, Harold Gillies Archive: https://www.rcseng.ac.uk
