BUILDING NEW FACES.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 244, 12 October 1918, Page 13

BUILDING NEW FACES.

HOW FACIAL WOUNDS ARE REPAIRED. WORK OF SCULPTOR SURGEON. Have you ever seen a sculptor working on a head of clay? While his eyes are fixed on his model his fingers are busily engaged in building a longer nose or 'shortening the one it already has, creating a more decided chin, making more pronounced lips, or rounding out the forehead. That is exactly the kind of creative work the surgeons are doing on the warfields of Europe to-day. In an attempt to assure readers of the entire plausibility of a situation in a story recently published, in .which the face of one of the .principal characters Is so changed by surgery that none ot his friends can recognise him. "The American Magazine" quotes one of these sculptor surgeons as saying:

" When the wounded began arriving at the field hospitals I was asked by the French Government to come to France and demonstrate the methods of plastic surgery 1 had been using in America.

"In almost every instance of facial wounds we were able to make the injured man resemble the photograph we used as a model. The moat interesting case I had was a man whose jaw had ■been shot away, practically from ear to ear.

" What we did was to lift a flap of skin from his shoulder and bind it to the fragments of bone left in his face. In three weeks this skin had grown over the shattered bone. Then we cut the ekin loose from the shoulder, allowing the man to lift his head.

"To make the chin, we took a piece from his shinbone, shaped it to the proper form, and grafted this into position. In a few months he looked very much as he had before he was wounded. That, of course, was what we wanted in his ease. If he had wanted to have the lower part of hie face changed in contour, we could have done it.

"We reiplacc noses in two ways. Sometimes we buy a finger from some other man. Or the patient may give one of his own fingers. Then we graft the hard knuckle of this finger into place where the nose w&e. When this part of the operation is completed, -we carve nostrils for breathing, and the work is done.

" We can even provide a beard if we think the man will look better that war, or if he particularly wants one. To do this, we cut the flap of skin from under a man's arm where there are the necessary hair follicles, and graft this to the chin." '

But it is not only the appearance of the fnce that the sculptor surgeon changes. He must really be a sculptor to n greater degree than at first appears. He must have a greater knowledge of the mechanics of armature than the sculptor, for it is a much more intricate kind of armature that he must concern himself with. There are eases in which the surgeon must erect a framework upon which to build-the new face, ag this extract from a letter .written by an American woman in a milita r y hospital in Paris, and published in "Th<s American Macrazine," will show:

To-day I saw an interesting case at the Durvea Depot; a young aviator who had fallen with his machine when it had caught fire. He landed on his face, which was smnshed to pieces. Otherwise he was not hurt.

" He has a new fnce now, the framework made of steel, from the eyes down; stee! cheekbones and jaws, false teeth and grafted skin and lips—which do not show at all. There were no sears. It is a perfectly normal face—quite miraculous."