INTRODUCTION
I Have had the pleasure of watching Major Gillies's plastic work since its initiation at the Cambridge Hospital at Aldershot, and later at the Queen's Hospital at Sidcup, where he and his British colleagues competed so cordially and so successfully with the surgeons from the Dominions in their efforts to restore the disfigured faces of the wounded to their normal form.
It was largely due to him that such rapid progress was effected in this special and difficult form of surgery, of which little or nothing was known before the war. Methods were employed and scrapped with great rapidity as improvements were devised.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the excellence of the work that was done by the several surgeons. Advantage was taken of it by many Americans and others, who profited greatly from observing the methods of treatment that had been developed there.
This book, which is so handsomely illustrated, gives a very thorough account of the many novel procedures which have been devised or elaborated at the Queen's Hospital. It will afford an excellent basis for much civil work, and I trust that special departments for plastic surgery will be started at the several teaching hospitals, and that means will be taken to secure the services of those surgeons who have had such wonderful opportunities to perfect themselves in this special work. It is not sufficiently recognised how readily the skill developed in this branch of war surgery is directly applicable to the relief of disfigurements met with in civil life. Ugly scars resulting from burns and accidents, deformities of the nose and lips, hare lip and cleft palate, abnormal protrusion or ill development of the mandible, moles, port-wine stains, all abound, and are not only the constant source of the greatest distress and anguish, but materially lower the market value of the individual. There is also a vast field in the obliteration of marks of operative interference, such as removal of malignant growths.
This book, written by so skilled and experienced an operator as Major Gillies, is invaluable to every general surgeon as well as to the plastic specialist.
I would also like to congratulate the publishers on the excellent manner in which they have produced this volume.
September 1919.
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