Plastic surgey born in wars

The War and Medicine exhibition that concluded on the 15th of February at the Wellcome Trust drew attention to the inevitable relationship between war and human injuries leading to the advancement of medicine.

War injuries taught physician how to develop their treatments and update them according to the different cases they experience in soldiers. This introduced us to new fields of medicine, such as plastic surgery that was founded in World War One (WW1), between 1914-1918.

During that war, the New Zealand born Harold Dolf Gillies used to treat wounded soldiers of the British Army across the fields of Belgium and France in 1914 and 1915. Gillies was developing new ways of fixing deformed faces of the soldiers. He developed the idea of using wide skin from different parts of the body for facial wounds closure. A soldier's face may be attached to his shoulder by a piece of skin to cover his wounded cheek.

War had a positive effect that it urged physicians to develop new ways and treatments to deal with the different cases and the pressure of the number of soldiers being injured at the same time. This may be the only benefit of wars.

In 1917, The Queen's Hospital opened in London provided with over 1000 beds. And that's where Gillies and his colleagues developed plastic surgery. Around 11,000 operations were performed on over 5,000 men, mostly soldiers with facial wounds.

Plastic surgery's roots started back then and it's still growing until today.