Books Over Drinks with Lindsey Fitzharris

We are so excited to welcome Lindsey Fitzharris to Auburn Oil Co. Booksellers for a Books Over Drinks event celebrating her new book The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I. 

Lindsey will be on hand to talk, answer questions, and sign books, as we enjoy book-inspired cocktails! Get your ticket today!

Your ticket includes admission, a cocktail, and a copy of the book.

BOOK SUMMARY

“Absolutely heartbreaking but so inspiring.” —Candice Millard

“Fitzharris’s engrossing biography elegantly weaves together history, innovation and the endurance of those whose battle scars were just the beginning of both their journeys, and it celebrates the medical mind who gave them all a second chance.” —Stephen L. Miller, The Spectator

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured. In the midst of this brutality, however, there were also those who strove to alleviate suffering. Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Facemaker tells the extraordinary story of such an individual: the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to reconstructing the burned and broken faces of the injured soldiers under his care.

Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world’s first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of practitioners whose task was to rebuild what had been torn apart, to re-create what had been destroyed. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of the wounded but also their spirits.

The Facemaker places Gillies’s ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine can be an art, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LINDSEY FITZHARRIS is the author of The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, which won the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and has been translated into multiple languages. Her television series The Curious Life and Death of… aired on the Smithsonian Channel. She contributes regularly to The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and other notable publications, and holds a doctorate in the history of science and medicine from the University of Oxford.