
The Facemaker
A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I
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Narrated by:
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Daniel Gillies
About this listen
"Enthralling. Harrowing. Heartbreaking. And utterly redemptive. Lindsey Fitzharris hit this one out of the park." —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile
Lindsey Fitzharris, the award-winning author of The Butchering Art, presents the compelling, true story of a visionary surgeon who rebuilt the faces of the First World War’s injured heroes, and in the process ushered in the modern era of plastic surgery. The audiobook is read by actor Daniel Gillies who is the great, great nephew of the pioneering surgeon, Harold Gillies.
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. 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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2022 Lindsey Fitzharris (P)2022 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- Unabridged
-
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The day Titanic sails from Queenstown, taking with it the hopes and dreams of so many, Harp’s life too is devastated. The small port town is shaken to its foundations at the loss of the unsinkable ship, but the revelation of a long-held secret means that Harp and Rose have a much more pressing issue to solve, one that could destroy them if they cannot find a solution.
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Love, love, love
- By Anij on 06-13-23
By: Jean Grainger
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Waco Rising
- David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias
- By: Kevin Cook
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1993, David Koresh and a band of heavily armed evangelical Christians took on the might of the US government. A two-month siege of their compound in Waco, Texas, ended in a firefight that killed seventy-six, including twenty-five children. America is still picking up the pieces, and we still haven't heard the full story.
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Thought Provoking
- By HankieG on 05-28-23
By: Kevin Cook
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The Invention of Surgery
- A History of Modern Medicine: From the Renaissance to the Implant Revolution
- By: David Schneider MD
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 23 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Written by an author with plenty of experience holding a scalpel, Dr. David Schneider's in-depth biography is an encompassing history of the practice that has leapt forward over the centuries from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians through the world-changing implant revolution of the 20th century.
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Joint dysfunction in need of excision
- By scott corron on 09-05-20
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Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher
- Monkey's Head, the Pope's Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul
- By: Brandy Schillace
- Narrated by: Jean Ann Douglass
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart, a young American neurosurgeon had an even more ambitious thought: Why not transplant the brain?
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Thinly veiled anti-communist propaganda
- By Brandi Swingley on 04-28-21
By: Brandy Schillace
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Dr. Mutter's Marvels
- A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine
- By: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
- Narrated by: Erik Singer
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools - or even wash his hands. This was the world of medicine when Thomas Dent Mütter began his trailblazing career as a plastic surgeon in Philadelphia during the middle of the 19th century. Although he died at just 48, Mütter was an audacious medical innovator who pioneered the use of ether as anesthesia, the sterilization of surgical tools, and a compassion-based vision for helping the severely deformed, which clashed spectacularly with the sentiments of his time.
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Morbidly wonderful
- By serine on 04-08-16
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The Unseen Body
- A Doctor's Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy
- By: Jonathan Reisman M.D.
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Jonathan Reisman - a physician, adventure traveler, and naturalist - brings listeners on an odyssey, navigating our insides like an explorer discovering a new world. With unique insight, Reisman shows us how understanding mountain watersheds helps to diagnose heart attacks, how the body is made mostly of mucus, not water, and how urine carries within it a tale of humanity’s origins.
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Great, Simply Great
- By Wendy on 10-21-22
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Spook
- Science Tackles the Afterlife
- By: Mary Roach
- Narrated by: Bernadette Quigley
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
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In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences.
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Read this book, but don't listen to it!
- By Christine on 11-21-09
By: Mary Roach
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The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth
- And Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine
- By: Thomas Morris
- Narrated by: Thomas Morris, Ruper Farley
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
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A puzzling series of dental explosions beginning in the 19th century is just one of many strange tales that have long lain undiscovered in the pages of old medical journals. Award-winning medical historian Thomas Morris delivers one of the most remarkable, cringe-inducing collections of stories ever assembled.
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Boring Toilet Humor
- By Nemo on 01-30-20
By: Thomas Morris
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Remarkable Creatures
- By: Tracy Chevalier
- Narrated by: Charlotte Parry
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary Anning learns that she has a unique gift: "The eye" to spot fossils no one else can see. When she uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious community on edge, the townspeople to gossip, and the scientific world alight. After enduring bitter cold, thunderstorms, and landslips, her challenges only grow when she falls in love with an impossible man.
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Wonderful Book!
- By Griffin on 02-01-10
By: Tracy Chevalier
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Get Well Soon
- History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
- By: Jennifer Wright
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
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In 1518, in a small town in Alsace, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn't stop. She danced until she was carried away six days later, and soon 34 more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had been stricken by the mysterious dancing plague. In late-19th-century England an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club in his gracious townhome - a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure.
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Didn't know syphilis could be so fascinating.
- By Kindle Customer on 02-09-17
By: Jennifer Wright
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Unmask Alice
- LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries
- By: Rick Emerson
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
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In 1971, Go Ask Alice reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portrayal of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. The supposed diary of a middle-class addict, Go Ask Alice terrified adults and cemented LSD's fearsome reputation, fueling support for the War on Drugs. Five million copies later, Go Ask Alice remains a divisive bestseller, outraging censors and earning new fans, all of them drawn by the book's mythic premise: A Real Diary, by Anonymous.
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I’m from Pleasant Grove where rumors of Jay’s Journal are alive and well
- By Ruby Tuesday on 10-06-22
By: Rick Emerson
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Most Delicious Poison
- The Story of Nature's Toxins―from Spices to Vices
- By: Noah Whiteman
- Narrated by: Noah Whiteman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them?
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Off topic
- By Stewart on 12-26-23
By: Noah Whiteman
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The Great Mortality
- An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
- By: John Kelly
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
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The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholars and the general public. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story. In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people—one third of the known population—before it vanished.
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The Great Mortality
- By Amazon Customer on 10-16-24
By: John Kelly
Sharp glimpse of war and medical possibilities
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Fascinating
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Helps if you have a medical background
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Wonderfully written. Can’t wait to “read” more from this author. I feel like I’ve learned about a forgotten hero…also as someone who has had a rhinoplasty, I’m very grateful for Gilles work!
You know it’s a good story when you find yourself (after a long day of work) thinking “let’s head to the front”
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Incredible Medical History
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Amazing Story
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Engaging beginning to end!
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An inspiring story
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Unexpectedly Great
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A gem of a book!
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