Limbs at War: Amputation, Mutilation and Paralysis – Wilfred Owen, Blaise Cendrars and D.H. Lawrence.
“We are among the ruins” (LCL 5), the narrator of Lady Chatterley’s Lover asserts at the beginning of the novel. If this postwar outlook obviously refers to the economic, political, social and moral situation of Europe, the ruins were also significantly individual: shell-shock (as Rebecca West depicts in The Return of the Soldier), disfigurement (notably represented in Henry Tonks’s paintings) and, what will be analyzed here, dismemberment, were particularly striking and new. The new war mach...
The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain
Summary During the First World War, the horror of facial mutilation was evoked in journalism, poems, memoirs and fiction; but in Britain it was almost never represented visually outside the professional contexts of clinical medicine and medical history. This article asks why, and offers an account of British visual culture in which visual anxiety and aversion are of central importance. By comparing the rhetoric of disfigurement to the parallel treatment of amputees, an asymmetrical picture emerges in which the ‘worst loss of all’—the loss of one's face—is perceived as a loss of humanity. The only hope was surgery or, if that failed, prosthetic repair: innovations that were often wildly exaggerated in the popular press. Francis Derwent Wood was one of several sculptors whose technical skill and artistic ‘wizardry’ played a part in the improvised reconstruction of identity and humanity.
Flesh Poems: Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery
This article focuses on Henry Tonks’ pastel studies of wounded First World War servicemen before, after and during facial surgery. Viewed alongside archival photographs of the same patients from the Cambridge Hospital at Aldershot and the Queen's Hospital (now Queen Mary's Hospital) in Sidcup, Tonks’ drawings disturb the conventions both of medical illustration and portraiture: they are discussed here in relation to the visual cultures of modern medicine (in particular nineteenth- and twentieth-century traditions of medical illustration and photography) and the artist's own thoughts on artistic objectivity and beauty. For Tonks, good drawing was tactile: without this sensibility and skill, he believed, the draughtsman's art was like playing a piano without hearing the notes. In light of Tonks’ wartime collaboration with the surgeon Harold Gillies, this paper explores the hypothesis that the history of surgery – and to some extent the history of medical representation – is a history of touch as much as a product of visual practices and conventions.