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Social History of Medicine Advance Access originally published online on March 14, 2007
Social History of Medicine 2007 20(1):111-130; doi:10.1093/shm/hkl080
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. All rights reserved

‘Broken Gargoyles’: The Photographic Representation of Severely Wounded New Zealand Soldiers

Sandy Callister*

* Honorary Research Associate, The University of Auckland, 18 Disley Street, Highbury, Wellington 6012, New Zealand E-mail: sandycallister{at}ihug.co.nz


  Abstract

Among the most disturbing images from the Great War are the close-up photographs of wounded soldiers. The medical photography of severely wounded soldiers is unknown and unseen in New Zealand's Great War historiography. An examination of the Macalister Archive held at Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup, Kent, enables a deeper understanding of the suppressed discourse of trauma in the First World War. The archive holds the records of 295 New Zealand soldiers who underwent reconstructive plastic surgery for extensive facial injuries. These photographic records enclose a world of bodily trauma and wartime horror. This archive, together with the Gillies Archive, documents the case-histories of Allied soldiers who underwent reconstructive plastic surgery for facial injuries incurred on the Western Front. Their historic significance as medical documents recording and cataloguing facial injuries and surgical results is assured. But their importance should transcend medical history. They represent a crucial punctuation point in the iconography of this war; one which brings us eyeball-to-eyeball with the wounded. But the resurfacing of hitherto unknown representations of horror raises other, equally complex issues: most importantly, it tells us something about the way in which war memory is contained.

Keywords: New Zealand; medical photography; plastic surgery; First World War; Gillies


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