Francis Derwent Wood

Francis Derwent Wood was a sculptor, born in England's Lake District in 1871. When he was too old (at 41) to enlist in the Army during World War I, he volunteered in the hospital wards. Facial wounds were a terrible scourge in that war: soldiers had not yet learned to fear the machine gun and bursting artillery shells. A 'quick glance' from a trench could in an instant change an infantryman's life.

Francis Wood's exposure to the gruesome injuries inflicted by the new war's weapons eventually led him to open a special clinic: the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department, located in the Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth. Instead of the rubber masks used conventionally, Wood constructed masks of thin metal, sculpted to match the portraits of the men in their pre-war normality.

Just as had been happening with soldiers operated upon with the recent advances in plastic surgery, Wood's masks provided each with a renewed self-confidence, even self-respect. Face wounds were known to be the most devastating. By hiding the wounds behind the mask, the young men were able to return to relationships with their families and friends.

Each mask required many weeks of work on the part of Woods, and other surgeons who followed his lead. A plaster cast was taken of the subject's wounded face - but only after the wounds and subsequent surgeries had totally healed. The crude process was itself a trial. The plaster cast was used to make a squeeze of plastocene or clay. This disfigured bust was used as the foundation of all prosthetic restorative work, with the scultor working to replace the missing components of the face with the shapes from the opposing side.

The mask itself was made form a thin copper sheet - galvanized copper to facilitate painting after forming. Painting a realistic portrait onto the copper mask was as challenging as the sculpting: each was finished while the patient wore it, in order to most accurately match the tone of the flesh with the enamels.

The ward stayed open only two years, from 1917 to 1919. There is no record of the exact number of masks made, but it must have been several hundred: a tiny drop among the more than 20,000 wounded in the face.

Wood died in London in 1926. He was fifty-five. His earnest efforts may not have helped statistically, but they influenced the lives of those he helped dramatically. And the helplessness of surgeons to medically deal with gross facial wounds led to advances in plastic surgery which helped in subsequent wars: from World War II to the present day.

Project Façade

A team in England have begun researching both the techniques of Wood's and others, and the stories of the patients and their families in an effort named Project Façade, centered at The Gillies Archive, Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup.^[1] The archive is named for Sir Harold Delf Gillies, a pioneering reconstructive surgeon in England. Gillies' seminal work was his text, Plastic Surgery of the Face.

Anna Coleman Ladd

Mrs. Anna Coleman Ladd, of Pennsylvania, (1905-1965) worked at a clinic similar to Wood's, in Paris, also during World War I.

References and Notes

1. ^ See the home page at http://www.projectfacade.com/index.php?/about/glossary_comments/anna_coleman_ladd/.

External links

• Smithsonian Magazine article, February 2007
• National Public Radio story, February, 2007
• Project Façade's page on Wood

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