Based on prewar photographs, and some artistic inspiration, his team molded copper recreations of the soldiers’ faces. Derwent Wood, who worked as a sculptor before his military service, oversaw the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department (nicknamed the “Tin Noses Shop”) at the Third London General Hospital.
To rehabilitate soldiers who had been disfigured, professional artists ran mask workshops between 19. Plastic surgery was not yet systematically taught, as medicine had not caught up to the advances of war. Noses, jaws, eyes, and cheeks were lost.ĭesign historian Katherine Feo writes the Journal of Design History:įacial prostheses were not a new phenomenon in 1918-they had been used for centuries to aid the injured and syphilitic-but they had never before been produced en masse as a systematic remedy for war rehabilitation, and certainly never as a direct design response to the type of violence and injury that characterized the First World War. Looking up from a trench, or out from under a steel helmet, exposed soft features of faces. New weapons like machine guns and bomb shrapnel, combined with improved medical care, meant people with major injuries survived-in visibly scarred ways. Long after Armistice was declared, and grass regrew over trenches and craters, the horrors of World War I were visible on the faces of soldiers.