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-- speeches from other prime ministers. >> who is the face maker referenced in the title of your new book? >> the face maker is harold gillies. this was a time when losing a limb made you a hero much losing a face made you a monster. he was not able to just men's these broken faces but to mend their broken spirits as well. >> why do you think readers would be interested in harold gillies story? >> i think it is important that we reckon with the damage war has on the human body. men who save life never gets the same recognition as those who -- destroy it. i hope my book goes a small way towards remedying that. >> your book begins with a note to readers and there is a point i would like to have you expand upon. you struggled with the decision about whether or not to clued -- include photos. >> i did not want this to be medical voyeurism. these men were exploited in the past but they were also hidden area they would leave the hospital grounds and to the public knew not to look at them. i also did not want to exploit their faces because there is a curiosity around those injuries are you and i made the decision to include their photos. i had extensive conversations with -- about this and i decided i would included the photos of the men teacher in the face maker but i would not include any patients not mentioned in the book. there is an exception, if the patient died in gillies care, i did not include his photo because he was not able to finish the reconstructive process. i included a pre-injured photo of him instead. >> you do write about how difficult it was for people with usual injuries during world war i to find acceptance in society. you met with a disability activist, what is the climate like today for people who suffer disfigurement either through war or trauma? >> i am not a spokes person for the disabled community -- that might not be aware that we use today, disfigured. that's the feeling was as -- that's the word disfigured i felt was appropriate for these men in world war i because they were disfigured in the society they lived in and they faced a lot of prejudice. in terms of more accepting today i cannot really answer that question but in hollywood, there is a really lazy trope about -- how many villains are disfigured? you have harvey who becomes evil after he is disfigured and burn. i think that is still a problem in society today. >> a little more about you. c-span's book tv covered you in 2017 for your first book. let's watch. >> illuminated the chorus line on the table in the back of the room. the body had been delayed to be on recognition, its abdomen hacked away by students who afterwards talks about decomposing organs. the top of the cadavers school had been removed and was sitting on a stool next to the deceased owner. the brain had begun to decay. early in the -- medical studies he came face to face with a similar scene. a central walkway splint the room and half with five wooden tables on either side. couldn't ours work -- cadavers. >> pretty macabre stuff. i heard you say sometimes on book two or -- book tours grown men fainted. how did you get into this? >> i was a strange kid. it does not come to a shock to anybody who follows me. my grandmother and i used to go from cemetery to cemetery hunting goes and i think there was always that macabre interest in history but also i was really fascinated with people who lived in the past, how they died. if you don't like history, you might like medical history because everybody knows what it is like to be -- especially coming out of this pandemic. i feel in those gaps. i can tell you what you would do in 1792 if you had a toothache. i hope that people can engage with the past in that way because you really can empathize with a lot of these people who lived in the past and did not have access to the kind of medical miracles we have today. x i have one more click. -- >> i have one more clip. let's watch. welcome back to under the knife. we will talk about this guys colorful afterlife. before the mid-19th century and bombing was chiefly used by anatomists. they used highly toxic chemicals like arsenic to prevent dk. over time, many anatomist experienced arsenic poisoning. and bombing changed when the civil war broke out in 1861. there was an enormous outcry. families could say a proper goodbye to the dead. it was during this period that the foundation of the modern funeral industry were late. >> clearly we learned about our history through the eyes of medical advances. you have a doctorate in medical history from oxford. i am wondering about the fields it. are there lots of people like you who are medical historians? >> i live in u.k. now for about 20 years now. medical history really thrives in the u.k.. there is a lot of wonderful collections. we are very lucky over there medically because we have access to this wonderful archival material. i cannot really speak to the programs in the u.s.. i know there are some u.s. -- universities. there are quite a few of us out there. a lot of medical historians were made in academia. i call myself more of a storyteller and i write narrative nonfiction. >> let's turn to the face maker. when world war i broke out you wrote it became slaughter on an industrial scale. it was -- what were the crimes of instruments used in world war i that brought fighting to a whole new level? >> there was an incredible number of advanced artillery weaponry at the time so much that a company of 300 men in 1914 -- as a 60,000 strong army. their work tanks which left crews susceptible to new kinds of injuries that had never been seen in previous wars and there were chemical weapons. these lethal cap attack -- gas attacks. men were names, burns, gas. some were even kicked in the face by horses. before the war was over 280 men would suffer some form of facial trauma. >> the science of destroying. you had so many advances in artillery weaponry and a medical community who is maybe trying to catch up with how to treat these wounds. at the beginning of the work the evacuation seemed to be slow so just getting off the battlefield could be difficult. -- who lays on the battlefield for three days unable to scream for help because he has no job. a lot of times they would pass these men by because they did not think the wounds were survivable. >> along had he been practicing -- how long had he been practicing medicine? >> he had been practicing for a fair amount of time. he was an ent surgeon, born in new zealand. he was well-placed in anatomy but when he went to france he was introduced by a character named charles valadier. he had a rolled -- rules voice which he retrofitted with a chair and drove it to the front -- he worked entirely free for the entire war. he is the one who showed gillies about this need for facial reconstruction. he demonstrates the importance of dentistry. >> how did ain't new zealand position finds himself on the front? where they drafted or it did many of the military personnel find themselves volunteering? >> he had already moved to britain and was educated -- he had a job in london. when the war broke out he volunteered with the red cross. there were so many people volunteering. nobody thoughts the war would last so long. i think the young man was 17 or 18, he went to volunteer with the army and they said would you like to stay for a year or until the end of the war? he said i don't want to state for a year. i want to stay until the end of the war. nobody really knew what they were getting into but there were a lot of medical trained people who rushed to volunteer to help and they were ultimately sent to france. >> tell me about gillies temperament. i remember you wrote the word impossible is not in his vocabulary. >> that is right. he was good at everything he set his mind to. he was a champion golf player, a confidence artist, confident musician. very competitive. when he set his mind to it he would never take no for an answer and that served his patients well. he was also sort of a prankster. it was called queens hospital. he would have this alternative persona called dr. scrubby and he would sneak in champagne and oysters, all of the things that were banned from the soldiers and he would gamble with them and bond with them. he was a really great persona for that situation. he lifted the spirits. >> how did other physicians respond to someone who would break the rules? >> he was in charge so i think he got away with it. when he opens the hospital he had a different -- so there was a canadian units and an australian unit and a british units. what was brilliant was each unit was headed by a surgeon. gillies was in charge of the british which was the largest. surgeons were competitive so standards rows of the board. when he established the hospital he wanted it to be a creative of so everyone can learn from each other because plastic surgery did not really exist as a specialty at that point. >> where does the name plastic surgery come from? >> it was coined in 1798 by a french surgeon. plastic meant something you could shape or mold. in this case a person's skin or soft tissue. although plastic surgery did predate the first war, -- it tended to focus on small areas such as gears or knows. -- years or knows -- ears or nose. it really allowed plastic surgery to enter a new modern area one in which new standards and methods could be tested and standardized and become part of standard practice. >> what was known about infections before antibiotics? >> and was before antibiotics. surgeons do understand german theory so my first book is all about joseph lister who introduced it in the late 19th century. even during the civil war surgeons still -- they were not coming to grips with german theory. so you see a bit of facial reconstruction surgery as that time but it was making sure the patient could swallow or speak. they were not really concerned with aesthetics. before -- during the first world war it was before antibiotics so infection rates could be high. joseph lister sort of creates a problem for harold gillies in the second book because you have this new generation of surgeons who are brought up on antiseptic techniques and they are not used to identifying infections at this point. in early years of the war there are surgeons asked the front hastily stitching up wounds trying to stop hemorrhaging and they are literally -- when they would independent gillies care he would have to unpick all this and reverse the infection so it was a really long process for a lot of the soldiers. >> what was date of the harper anesthesia in that era? >> anesthesia had not progressed so you are really talking about a lag or -- if you pick up the face maker and you see the photos, you will instantly understand why a mask over the face can be problematic for you it would be painful but also it obscured the air yet the surgeon needed to work on. -- the area the surgeon needed to work on. so what happens during the first world war is you have the developed facial reconstruction in surgery and developments in anesthesia kind of like the beef story to gillies a story. -- b story to gillies a story. >> why did you say that soldiers feared anesthesia more than surgery? >> there was not a way to measure how much drugs were getting into the system and these drugs could make soldiers very sick and nauseated. i think there was a lot of anxiety around that anesthesia. these men were undergoing multiple surgeries over multiple years sometimes even over a decade. because these drugs could be hard on the system and weaken the heart, and in fact there is a soldier i talk about who ends up dying as a result of the anesthesia. >> what was used for pain medication? >> you had morphine and opioids and things like that. one of gillies patients, a pilot who i discussed at the beginning who ends up dying in his care, he was a pilot and he crashed and suffered severe burns. these early airmen were taking to the skies just 10 years after the wright brothers. they would call themselves the 20 minute clubs and they often brought pistols into those planes not to shoot each other but to shoot themselves if they had been hit to save themselves from a fate worse than death. it takes a year before you find -- he finds himself in a gillies care. he is highly addicted to morphine because it is a very painful condition. he is in a really bad state. gillies does not want to do the surgery right away. he just wants to move forward so against his better judgment gillies does the operation and he ends up dying because a system becomes overwhelmed. it is a very sad story but important to the history of medicine because it teaches gillies an important lesson which is that you -- when you are rebuilding the face you have to do it in small increments and you should put off today what you can reasonably do tomorrow which becomes a principle of plastic surgery. >> these soldiers were very young so on a positive side a whole life ahead of them but also a better chance of recovery. on the negative side you write about the fact they went to war with poor dental habits and also that smoking was excessive in european society particularly britain. how did this impact the recovery? >> you are right. they were not in great health to begin with. when you are in the transition for months -- in the tr enches for months. the dental hygiene was really poor. when you have a -- whipping in the face there is a lot of bacteria. this was a real challenge. the other thing was in the trenches they were giving these men hard biscuits that can crack their teeth. there was so many problems. they were overworked and undernourished. when we get to gillies, they are often in a depleted health situation. we really had to rebuild their entire bodies and systems and get nourishment back into them so they could withstand the surgery. >> what you described as kelly's idea to create a central hub. -- gillies idea to create a central hub. how accepting were they in some of these ground making -- groundbreaking ideas? >> he recognizes there is a need for a specialty unit. he goes back to britain and petitions to open a specialty unit at the hospital. they do not really taken too seriously remember these were not seeing these kinds of injuries. so these men in london were not necessarily convinced there was a need for this. but he does end up opening a specialty unit and he leaves the war office, walks down the road and goes into a store. buys the labels and hand labels them and addresses them to himself at the military hospital and send them to the french. he sends a letter saying anybody with a facial wound puts this label on their uniform, sends them to me and i will handle it. before long all of these men end up in his hospital ward with these labels pinned to their uniforms. eventually he is so overwhelmed that he has to establish an entire hospital because there is no way he can take on those numbers in one single unit. >> the hospital was named queens hospital and the queen makes a couple cameo appearances in your book. what was her role and how involved wishy in their needs and care? >> several members did visit the hospital and they were very supportive of the war efforts. they wanted to be seen as patrons of this medical war going on. the queen herself really had an interest in the hospital being established. there was one surgeon who was really hesitant to move to the queens hospital. and she ends up convincing him. it was really to the benefit of the hospital and other surgeons because everybody could see each other's work, learn from each other and standards rose. he also brought in dental technicians, photographers, mask makers. he brought in artists. artist would go and create picked oral records of what gillies is doing in the operating room. >> i wanted to pick up a little more because we meet one of the people that he was documenting, henry tonks. why did gillies understand it was important to document what he was doing? >> he was so forward thinking because remember, plastic surgery was not a specialty in medicine at the time. gillies recognized what he was doing was rebuilding faces and needed to be documented and it was beyond his ability to do this and a visual way. he was confident but he was also busy. so he ends up bringing in this artist henry tonks. he has a well-known artist at the time. he had medical training himself. henry tonks comes in and he is the one who creates a lot of these diagrams but he also paints these wonderful portraits of soldiers. i include the black-and-white photos of the men in the book. i did not include the thompso -- tonks portraits. what was amazing was that he was able to attach humanity and men that you do not see in the photos and he was able to document the color of bruising and other aspects of the injuries that were important to capture. the work of the artist -- he was not the only artist. the work of the artists were very important. >> you made reference to prosthetics and masks. there are two people who made facial masks for soldiers that had facial injuries. what was that science or art like? what did it provide for those coming back with these kinds of wounds? >> a lot of people will be familiar with these masks -- they were extraordinary and if you look at photos, they look very realistic. these were artists who are offering non-surgical solutions to soldiers injured. maybe some men did not want to go through operations but also gillies and -- employed mask makers. the mask could come in as useful to helping you blend into society while you are waiting for your surgery. there was a soldier who was asked the queens hospital and he would wear this mask but they were really uncomfortable. they were metal and it was hot. so the men generally hated them and i want to remind people these soldiers were wearing the masks for you not for themselves so that you would feel comfortable looking at them. he would go out to the city and sometimes take the mask off because it was hot or uncomfortable. when he came back to the hospital he would hold up 1, 2, fingers to show how many people got upset or fainted looking at him. the mask makers were important and they are very realistic but of course if you were sitting across from someone it could be unsettling. the mask did not operate like a face. it was fragile. it did not really offer the longtime solution surgery did. >> how long were soldiers typically patients of his entities hospitals? >> it depends. it depends on the severity of the injury. some of these men he continued to operate on for over a decade. some of them it could have been a shorter stay. a lot of these men had to be sent back to the front. in the early years, the army did not like these and to be sent back to the front because they thought the disfigurement what hit the morale of the troops. so i always say to people as well, it is -- as wonderful as these medical advances were during the first world war, there were even the first blood banks, this was all great and it served as -- served us. but i also came to this realization halfway through writing the book, that it also served to prolong the war because as doctors and nurses got better, it was a vicious cycle and i think we need to acknowledge that part of the story as well. >> you talk about how gillies was an artist and emphasized trying to restore these service to as much of their prewar facial structure as he could. where there military officers who would say we stop at this point. we need to get them back to the front? absolutely. there are a couple soldiers featured in the face maker. this was really disappointing to these meant to be sent back before their surgeries are completed area i'm sure that was frustrated for gillies and the other surgeons. >> you write that all was not -- and roses amongst the surgeons there even though they were cooperative. there were times they became competitive. is that just human nature? >> anybody who is a surgeon today will recognize that behavior. there was that competitiveness which can be good because it did drive up standards but there was some pettiness and particularly around something called the -- which is what gillies invented during the first world war. if you are rebuilding somebody's face, you would need something called a flap because a lot of the tissue was gone. so a flap is like that stakes of plastic surgery. if somebody is missing their nose they will need a flap to reconstruct the nose. the traditional method left the flap open on one side so that could leave it open to infection. so what gillies did is take this lap of tissue and roll it like an elephant trunk. all of the tissue inside was encapsulated with skin on the outside and this would protect it. so he could take a trunk of tissue from your thigh, and attach it to your abdomen. once it is attached he could sever it from the thigh and flip it and move it up and so forth until it gets to the face. it is really incredible. what happened was another surgeon after the war that also works into gillies hospital claimed he invented it. but there is evidence to say gillies was the first at the queens hospital to do its. were other people during the war developing similar methods. there was a great need for facial reconstruction at this time. >> you write about how often these ideas -- the patient was on the table and surgery. what did you learn about how he approached and became so inundated? >> plastic surgery even to date, gillies went have to visualize what he would do. he would seclude himself and his office before an operation. when he got in there, problems arose and he had to improvise and he was very good at improvising on his deeds. there were no textbooks to guide him. it was never to this great extent. he really had to make a lot of this up as he went. he was able to do extraordinary things as a result. >> how was he and his fellow surgeons able to relate bone and cartilage? >> they would harvest it from other areas of the body like the ribs. they could rebuild the structure of the nose from there. one of the oldest techniques was a forehead flap. it goes back to an indian method. if you take a tip of -- a piece of string from the tip of your nose to your forehead. taking a flap from the format and moving it down and twisting it over the nose is a very effective method. then you take the remaining skin which is very stretchy and you can cover the wound. so he was using a lot of those old methods but he was also experimenting with new methods. there was a lot of trial and error. he was extraordinarily talented and also a little bit of luck and was able to restructure faces to a high level over 100 years ago. >> failure had a constant presence at queens hospital. tell me more. >> he didn't lose patience. i always go back to -- being the example, the pilots who died in his care. those stories need to be told because firstly, they are important to the history and development of plastic surgery. failure is very important in science. it does not get acknowledged as much as successes. think about all of the things that fail. that in form but what does not work and drives researchers in a different direction. that is important to gillies story as well. he has several other patients who died and his care, one from anesthesia. it was devastating to him. he could not even go to the funeral because he was so overwhelmed with other patients. on a personal level it haunted him. there were times he would break down. there is a scene where he was on the golf course and he is notified one of his patients died and he loses it. i think on a personal level it can be devastating to him. these unfortunate lessons did teach them how to succeed and that is why i include them in the book. >> how much interest whether in gillies work by the british press? there was a lot of interest. unlike the men who were losing limbs picture in newspapers with smiling with their nurses, you did not really get images of disfigured soldiers. but they were fascinated with what he was able to do and there is a journalist who comes to visit the hospital when using the surgery end the operating room and he gets a bit woozy and he has to leave to get air. they show him at the hospital all these before and after photos and he is blown away by the results. >> was gillies well-known by the british public? >> there was a little bit of press coverage but he certainly did not get the accolades he deserved. it was long after the war he received his knighthood and there were some who wrangled at this. he did not seem overly concerned with that kind of praise. he was really patient focused and continue to operate on the men long after the war was over. that story does not end with the war being over. these men continue their painful journeys to recovery for many years after. gillies was always at their side. >> he received his knighthood was at 1952? or earlier? what it was earlier but i would have to look at the exact date. it was much later than you really should have received it. when he did receive it, there were so many patients of his that wrote to congratulate him. one said it you will not remember us but we remember you. there were so many men that it would be hard for gillies to remember them on an individual level. some of them became loyal to him. one of them ends up becoming his secretary for the rest of gillies life. so they bonded and await that a -- in a way a trauma sold -- surgeon would not know. >> one of those is someone we need a couple times in your book. private percy clare. what is his story? >> when i sent out to write the pacemaker, i knew i wanted to drop the -- right in the middle of the battle. what did it smell like? what did it look like? when did it feel like? it is difficult because it is nonfiction so you have to find enough documentation to bring it to life. percy clare got shot in the face, the bullets went through one cheek and out the other. he laid in the battlefield for a significant amount of time and he wrote this diary about his experiences. the bad thing about percy clare was that he got shot in 1917 so i open with his worry but have to dial the book back to right before the beginning of the war in the first chapter. percy lays on that battlefield and they passed them by because a lot of times these men did not think these facial wounds were survivable so they would pass by anybody. this could be a real challenge just getting off the battlefield. i was in contact with his i believe great, great niece. her father had donated his diary to the war museum. i needed to get permission to open the diary. i asked if she knew anything about percy clare and she said she did not personally know anything. i discussed in the book the fact he had this tiny bible with him and when he got shot he thought he was going to die, this was before dog tags. so he took his bible out and it had his mother's address and it and he clenched it because he thought if they found his body they would be able to contact his mother. she did not even know this story. so i always tell people donates those items to museums if you do not want them because they help people put stories together. >> were dog tags typical? >> that was in the middle of the war, called discs i believe. at first they were only given one, which was a problem because if they took the disk off to identify and notify the family and buried the body, the body became anonymous if it was not recorded. so now the dogtags you would have two, one to notify the family and leave the other dog tag with the family -- body. it had never been seen on this scale death and destruction. a lot of men were sent into the trenches without protective gear for their head, it was only later in the work that helmet became iconic in the first world war. >> no helmets? >> not in the first year. then in the british come up with one. even the helmet really didn't give that much protection. in the tanks these men had these mask they would wear. you can google world war i tank mask. but a lot of times the men did not wear them at all because they were uncomfortable. if the tank was hit, things could fly off within the tank and hits the men in the faces or they could be birds. these new -- or they could be burned. >> how long did it take for germans to deploy chlorine gas and when were they given gas masks to help protect them? >> the first gas attack i believe was quite early in the war. i would have to double check that fact. i always say even hatched the beginning of the book -- x the beginning of the book. i do talk about the development of chemical weapons early in the war. psychologically the impact of these gas attacks was enormous. they do end up developing gas masks and they become synonymous with the savagery of the first world war. it was really terrifying for the soldiers as well to see these new weapons. >> you also noted in the book they carried backpacks weighed 60 pounds when they got deployed. typically uniforms were well at the time -- will --wool at the time? >> yes, there are stories of men just drowning in the mud. i came across really horrific stories and diaries. the extraordinary thing about the first world war is it was the time of war poetry entities men weren't recording their feelings and thoughts and away that's in earlier centuries it is hard to get a sense of that from soldiers and patients. so i was lucky in that way. but you can also get really bogged down in these terrible stories. so it was a traumatic book to write in that sense as well. i felt very connected to these men in the end. there is a man who laid in the battlefield for three days after he was injured, he was not able to scream because he had no job. his story was sad and happy because when he had -- his fiancee breaks off the engagement and that happened to a lot of the soldiers. the happy ending was that the fiancee's friend got word of this and she began writing to him as the hospital and they soon all in love and got married. but when he was discharged he went back to work as a teller's assistant and his boss made him work as the back of the shop because he did not want him to frighten the customers. not all wounds were created on the battlefield at this time. i think that is one of the themes of the pacemaker. -- face maker. >> was there a lot of pioneering work going on there as well? >> i talk about a man named j aques joseph. he had actually been doing some cosmetic surgery before the war. he was really well placed to understand facial anatomy. there is a french surgeon i discussed as well, they tend to not work and a collaborative way. they are not necessarily working with dental surgeons which was really important to rebuilding the face. gillies takes a collective approach and that is why his work really stood out against other surgeons work doing that kind of same facial reconstruction. >> the story of dr. harold gillies in world war i and his pioneering work in plastic surgery. on top of all of the war another devastation arrived in the form of the pandemic. how did that change the medical equation of the work being done to rehabilitate the soldiers? >> we were living through a pandemic as i was writing this book and i was aced in the u.k. so we were under severe lockdowns. i knew i was coming up chronologically against the pandemic 1918. there was people in gillies hospital who worked at the hospital who succumbed to the flu and also some of the soldiers gillies had been working on. imagine surviving the war, imagine surviving a facial injury so terrible and some of the reconstructive process and then dying from the flu. it was really devastating. the thing about the flu pandemic of 1918 is that it really hit a lot of these younger men. these men whose health was already depleted coming out of the trenches. >> how in a big medical facility like queens hospital would you prevent the pandemic from spreading rapidly? >> there was masking. that's was more or less all they could really do ask this time. there was no vaccine. it was very much how wheat covid at the beginning, -- how we controlled covid at the beginning. distancing. some of gillies patients do die and some of his path die as well. -- staff die as well. >> how did that change the nature of the research you would typically do for a project like this? >> i was lucky because i had to praise the archivist and the library. i was fortunate i could access this stuff in and that way. the war definitely challenges. there were challenges accessing these patient files because there is patient confidentiality. when i talk about a patient it is because harold gillies himself printed those cases in his textbook on plastic surgery. if i went into pace notes and found something that he had not mentioned in his book, i could not talk about it in relation to the patient's name. there were challenges navigating these archives with the sensitivity of this material. in some cases i had to prove these men were dead. could you imagine if i discovered one was alive? it was a much more complicated process than writing about joseph lister because you are not facing any of that and of time had passed -- >> this the queens hospital help to promote -- >> it does. it is called queen mary's hospital. it became known as the queens hospital. i do not know much about the kind of work that's they still do there today. >> war was over, how long did police continue working at queens hospital? >> he continued working a long time after the war was over on these men but as that point, as the war ended and things were wrapping up, a lot of surgeons began leaving queens hospital. they went back to their private practices. they did not necessarily pursue plastic surgery. gillies believed strongly that plastic surgery could be transformative work and he wanted to establish it as a specialty. so he continued to work on reconstructive cases with soldiers and moved to the cosmetic realm as well. reconstructive work was about returning something to normal whereas cosmetic was about surpassing the normal. >> as you described it, there was pushback at the time about continuing plastic surgery that's people felt when it was not reconstructive. when it was cosmetic it was about vanity. how did he fight that perception? >> gillies also struggled internally, because he wondered if this was an ethical way to make money for instance. he also talks about how even a slight imperfection for someone could have a huge impact on their mental states. he would say who is he to decide whether they should change that about themselves. he believed people should control their identities. an extraordinary story is in 1949, the construction of a p nest on a trans man in a 1949, gillies was very well-placed to do this because he had been working on a genital reconstruction of soldiers who have been injured in at the second world war. so he undertook this case. it was a sad story. but gillies stood by him. it went back to his belief in being able to control your identity read restoring your identity through facial reconstruction or helping improve your appearance by cosmetic tweaking or surgery. >> michael dillon's story is a contemporary one and 1949 this was? >> yes i think a lot of people will be surprised that that kind of operation had been successfully performed early on. he continued to do reconstructive work. in the 1920's, women began removing facial hair with x-rays which is a bad idea. and they developed cancer on their faces so surgeons would go and remove the cancer and in the process disfigure these women and a lot of them ended up in gillies care. i think if gillies lived today he would be interested in a face transplant, this new technology just reconstructive surgery as well as transplant surgery. and he would continue to push those boundaries. >> he lived until september of 1960. i am wondering did he practice almost until the end of his life? >> he did. he suffered a small stroke while he was operating on a patient. the patient was fine. gillies lived at least for another month after that incident. he really was trying to help patients all the way until the end. >> how are his professional contributions viewed across history? >> in plastic surgery certainly surgeons recognize ms the grandfather of modern plastic surgery. the general public know less about him. in britain, his hut -- cousin overshadowed him because he was the one to operate in the guinea pig club. the pilots who were terribly burned who called themselves the guinea pig love. i believe -- guinea pig club. there was a lot of attention around this. his cousin equips his harold gillies but it was gillies who introduced his cousin to the plastic surgery. it is my hope that i can allow gillies to live again in the public imagination and people can learn about his extraordinary work. i do hope people pick up the face maker and do not think i have done gillies story justice but also the soldiers because it is as much about them as it is him. >> is there the next step for you in a story that you see as a logical progression to another tail you want to tell? >> it is not like a trilogy is coming. i always go where the story is. i am a medical historian that i always go where the story is. my next book is about a surgeon named joseph bell who is the real-life inspiration for sherlock holmes. it is going to be about all the wonderful real-life characters who served as inspiration for these fictional characters along the way. >> back to the victorian era. is there something about that time that interest you? >> it is a bit easier. i do not have to navigate complicated patient confidentiality. i thought gillies story should be told so that a nonspecialist audience could connect with that story. it was such an undertaking. it took me five years to write that book. i am hoping this one will be quicker. i am working my way through a 500 page diary and i think it will be fun for people to learn about victorian forensics through this character. his grandfather was the one who discovered bell's palsy. so he comes from a very interesting medical background. >> when do you anticipate that one will be out? >> i have to finish with the face maker so probably in about three years. next year i also have a children's coming out. it is going to be an illustrated wrong premedical -- romp through medical history. and the things doctors try to do to help people. >> the current book is called the face maker. dr. lindsey fitzharris is on a book tour right now in los angeles. thank you so much for joining us on zoom for conversation about your book. we appreciate your time. >> thank you so much for having me on. >> all q and a programs are available on our website or as a podcast on our c-span now at.
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