'The Facemaker' profiles the British surgeon who treated WWI's disfigured soldiers

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/08/ [login to see] /the-facemaker-review-lindsey-fitzharris-wwi-disfigured-soldiers
There were no textbooks.

That's the one detail, amidst all the other revelations that Lindsey Fitzharris offers in The Facemaker, that continues to take me aback. There were no textbooks for the British surgeon Harold Gillies to consult when he and his team were called upon to reconstruct the faces of some of the estimated 280,000 men who suffered facial trauma during World War I.

Those soldiers' faces were shattered and burned by the new technologies that that war ushered in: machine guns, chemical weapons, flamethrowers, shells, and hot chunks of shrapnel from explosives. As one battlefield nurse said, "the science of healing stood baffled before the science of destroying."