Harold Gillies

Sir Harold Gillies OBE FRCS
Born	Harold Delf Gillies (1882-06-17)17 June 1882 Dunedin, New Zealand
Died	10 September 1960(1960-09-10) (aged 78) Marylebone, London, England
Alma mater	Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Occupation(s)	Otolaryngologist and pioneer plastic surgeon
Years active	c. 1910–1960
Known for	Plastic surgery, sex reassignment surgery
Spouse	Kathleen Margaret Jackson ​ ​ (m. 1911)​
Relatives	Robert Gillies (father) Mick Gillies (son) Daniel Gillies (descendant) Archibald McIndoe (cousin)

Sir Harold Delf Gillies OBE FRCS (17 June 1882 – 10 September 1960) was a New Zealand otolaryngologist and father of modern plastic surgery for the techniques he devised to repair the faces of soldiers coming back from the trenches.

Early life

Gillies caricatured in Punch's Personalities by George Belcher, 1929

Gillies was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, the son of Member of Parliament in Otago, Robert Gillies. He attended Whanganui Collegiate School and studied medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where despite a stiff elbow sustained sliding down the banisters at home as a child, he was an excellent sportsman. He was a golf blue in 1903, 1904 and 1905 and also a rowing blue, competing in the 1904 Boat Race. In 1910, he acquired a position working as an ENT specialist for Sir Milsom Rees' medical practice. At Caius he became a freemason and rose to be Master of Caius Lodge. Gilles was a student at St Bartholomew's Hospital and won the Luther Holden Research Scholarship in 1910. He was also Lecturer on Plastic Surgery in that medical school.

Career

World War I

Walter Yeo, a sailor injured at the Battle of Jutland, is assumed to be the first person to receive plastic surgery in 1917. The photograph shows him before (left) and after (right) receiving a flap surgery performed by Gillies.

Following the outbreak of World War I he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. Initially posted to Wimereux, near Boulogne, he acted as medical minder to a French-American dentist, Auguste Charles Valadier, who was not allowed to operate unsupervised but was attempting to develop jaw repair work. Gillies, eager after seeing Valadier experimenting with nascent skin graft techniques, then decided to leave for Paris, to meet the renowned oral surgeon Hippolyte Morestin. He saw him remove a tumour on a patient's face, and cover it with jaw skin taken from the patient. Gillies became enthusiastic about the work and on his return to England persuaded the army's chief surgeon, William Arbuthnot-Lane, that a facial injury ward should be established at the Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot.

The ward rapidly proved inadequate for the increasingly large number of patients in need of treatment, and a new hospital devoted to facial repairs was developed at Sidcup. The Queen's Hospital opened in June 1917, and with its convalescent units provided over 1,000 beds. There, Gillies and his colleagues developed many innovative plastic surgery techniques; more than 11,000 operations were performed on over 5,000 men. The hospital, later to become Queen Mary's Hospital, was at Frognal House (the birthplace and property of Thomas Townshend, Lord Sydney after whom Sydney, Australia, was named).

For his war services Gillies was knighted in the 1930 Birthday Honours. Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, 1st Baronet, commented, "Better late than never".

Private practice

Frognal House, formerly Queen Mary's Hospital, in 2002

Between the wars Gillies developed a substantial private practice with Rainsford Mowlem, including many famous patients, and travelled extensively, lecturing, teaching and promoting the most advanced techniques worldwide.

In 1930 Gillies invited his cousin, Archibald McIndoe, to join the practice, and also suggested he apply for a post at St Bartholomew's Hospital. This was the point at which McIndoe became committed to plastic surgery, in which he too became pre-eminent.

World War II

During World War II Gillies acted as a consultant to the Ministry of Health, the RAF and the Admiralty. He organised plastic surgery units in various parts of Britain and inspired colleagues to do the same, including pioneering plastic surgeon Stewart Harrison who founded the plastic surgery unit at Wexham Park Hospital, Berkshire. His own work continued at Rooksdown House, part of the Park Prewett Hospital, Basingstoke. During this period, and after the war, he trained many doctors from Commonwealth nations in plastic surgery.

Pioneering gender-affirming surgery

Instead of retiring at the end of the Second World War Gillies had to keep working as he had insufficient savings.

In 1946, he and a colleague carried out one of the first gender-affirming surgery from female to male on Michael Dillon. In 1951 he and colleagues carried out one of the first modern gender-affirming surgeries, from male to female, on Roberta Cowell, using a flap technique, which became the standard for 40 years.

Gillies made a visit to New Zealand in 1956 after an absence of 51 years.

On his work for Cowell and Dillon, Gillies remarked: “If it gives real happiness, that is the most that any surgeon or medicine can give.”

Death

Gillies suffered a slight cerebral thrombosis at the age of 78 while undertaking a major operation on the damaged leg of an 18-year-old girl on 3 August 1960.

Gillies died on 10 September 1960 at The London Clinic, at 20 Devonshire Place, Marylebone. Despite earning an estimated £30,000 per year between the First and Second World Wars he left an estate of only £21,161.

Personal life

Gillies married Kathleen Margaret Jackson on 9 November 1911, in London. They had four children. His eldest son, John Gillies, flew Spitfires with No. 92 Squadron RAF in World War II. John was shot down over France on 23 May 1940, and became a POW for the duration of the war. Harold's youngest son Michael Thomas Gillies followed his father into medicine. Actor Daniel Gillies is his descendant.

Gillies was an amateur golfer. He played in the Amateur Championship every year from 1906 to 1931 and represented England in their annual match against Scotland in 1908, 1925, 1926 and 1927. He won the 1913 St. George's Grand Challenge Cup and was runner-up in the 1914 Golf Illustrated Gold Vase, behind Harold Hilton. He won the President's Putter in 1925. His older brother Charles won the 1899 Australian Amateur.

For many years his home was at 71 Frognal, Hampstead, London. A blue plaque on the front of that house now commemorates his life and work. In Cambridge, in 2015, Gonville and Caius College built twelve houses and named the road "Gillies Close" (postcode CB5 8ZD) in his honour. Gillies Lane at Gun Hill Park in Aldershot, the former Cambridge Military Hospital, similarly commemorates him.

Selected publications

• Gillies HD. Plastic Surgery of the Face. Henry Frowde. 1920, 1983. ISBN 0-906923-08-5
• Gillies HD, Millard DR. The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery. Butterworth. 1958.

Reviews

• Davis, A. D. (1957). "The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery". California Medicine. 87 (1): 67. PMC 1512094.

Bibliography

External videos
Q&A interview with Leslie Fitzharris on The Facemaker, 11 July 2022, C-SPAN

• Fitzharris, Lindsey (2022). The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I (Hardback). New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN 9780374282301.
• Meikle, Murray C. (2013). Reconstructing Faces: The Art and Wartime Surgery of Gillies, Pickerill, McIndoe and Mowlem (Hardback). Dunedin: Otago University Press. ISBN 978-1-877578-39-7. OCLC 870975648.
• Pound, Reginald (1964). Gillies: Surgeon Extraordinary (Hardback). Michael Joseph.
• Slevin, Tom (2008). "The Wound and the First World War: 'Cartesian' Surgeries to Embodied Being in Psychoanalysis, Electrification and Skin Grafting". Body and Society. 14 (2): 39–61. doi:10.1177/1357034X08090697. S2CID 144441785.
• Seymour, Miranda (23 July 2010). "Carrying on". The New York Times (Sunday Book Review). New York. Retrieved 5 May 2022.

External links

• "Harold Gillies – Aesthetic Reconstructor". NZ Edge. Archived from the original on 16 October 2009. Retrieved 20 February 2009.
• "Gillies Archives". Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup. Retrieved 20 February 2009.
• "Harold Gillies (1882–1960)". Surgical Tutor. Archived from the original on 3 May 2009. Retrieved 20 February 2009.
• "Project Facade". Archived from the original on 28 April 2007. Retrieved 20 February 2009.
• "Harold Delf Gillies, plastic surgeon (1882–1960)". WW2 People's War Archive. BBC. Retrieved 25 March 2007.
• "Gillies, Harold Delf (1882–1960)". Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Retrieved 25 March 2007.
• Kennedy, Pagan (18 March 2007). "The First Man-Made Man (first chapter)". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 March 2007.