Over at the Smithsonian Magazine website, there is an absolutely astonishing article on Britain's Tin Noses Shop, otherwise known as the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department, which revolutionized the art of facial reconstructive surgery even as World War I produced more disfigured soldiers to practice on than anyone knew what to do with.
The large-caliber guns of artillery warfare with their power to atomize bodies into unrecoverable fragments and the mangling, deadly fallout of shrapnel had made clear, at the war's outset, that mankind's military technology wildly outpaced its medical: "Every fracture in this war is a huge open wound," one American doctor reported, "with a not merely broken but shattered bone at the bottom of it." The very nature of trench warfare, moreover, proved diabolically conducive to facial injuries: "[T]he...soldiers failed to understand the menace of the machine gun," recalled Dr. Fred Albee, an American surgeon working in France. "They seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of bullets."
The photo gallery is particularly fascinating. Upon being given a new nose and a fake mustache to hide the hideous deformity of a face that had been half blown off, one thanked the Tin Nose Department in a letter, writing "Thanks to you, I will have a home. The woman I love will be my wife."
Faces of War [Smithsonian Magazine]
