8/23/2023 0 Comments Cutting plastic eyeballsThis process further denies the patient any sort of gaze while giving more power to that of the plastic surgeon-a person already in a position of immense authority and influence. This visually suggests that they were not involved in their cases in the first place-from the ‘before’ images to the ‘after’ images these civilians are blind to their own pathology. They cannot gaze back out at the viewer, the reader, or the doctor looking at their cases. But what happens when the eyes of the patient are literally excised from the medical narrative? By cutting the eyes out of the photographs of patients, Gillies’s textbook denies the subject of the photographs any agency in their own treatment, while simultaneously granting them anonymity. The physician looks at his patient in an objectifying manner, in a way that is intended to bring the mysterious questions about the human body, illness, and injury, to light. Įyes and hands are the two most important body parts for doctors and for diagnoses, and eyes have an irreplaceable role in the discourses of the medical gaze, as delineated by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 1973. The discourse of the world passes through open eyes, eyes open at every instant as for the first time. In the ‘Plastic Surgery in Civil Cases’ photographs, Gillies and his publishers perform and approximate eye injuries in the uncensored images the violence done to eyes is often real and physical. In the First World War, during which Gillies did much of his revolutionary surgery work, over sixty thousand men in Britain were wounded in the head or in the eyes. The nurse Vera Brittain wrote a letter saying that she had seen men ‘without faces, without eyes, without limbs, men almost disembowelled, men with hideous truncated stumps of bodies.’ Eyes were frequently shot out or blinded by mustard gas, exposed and vulnerable targets in their viscous liquidity. The excising of eyes mirrors the mutilation that appears in the servicemen sections of Gillies’s textbook and throughout the First World War. The question of who ‘deserves’ anonymity is one for another piece of writing, but it is clear from Gillies’s book that he (or the ethical statutes in place in his field) marked civilians as needing that violent proof of de-personalisation in medical photographs, executed by cutting out their eyes. Gillies does not mention in the introduction to this section why he has decided to cut out the eyes of these patients rather than the servicemen in his other chapters, but the practice suggests that the civilians in 1920 had more of a right to anonymity than the soldiers in the earlier sections of the book. These cases are mostly of lupus, syphilis, and hare-lips rather than bomb blasts and shell fragments to the face-the injuries that the rest of the book covers. In the last section of Plastic Surgery of the Face (‘Plastic Surgery in Civil Cases’), the eyes of patients with graphic facial injuries have been manually cut out of the photographs, giving the pages an ad hoc, craft-like appearance. Gillies is considered to be the father of modern British plastic surgery he is best known for his experimental and pioneering treatments of facially injured servicemen during the First World War. One of the most famous examples of this visual oddity is the 1920 publication Plastic Surgery of the Face, published by Sir Harold Delf Gillies. It may come as a surprise that a physical manifestation of this timeless concept-that the eyes function as the seat of a person’s humanity-appears in textbooks and images intended to teach plastic and reconstructive surgeons how to mend a face ravaged by war or disease. Why are human beings so connected to their eyes and so affected by the eyes of others? Of course, the old adage ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’ could be used to answer this seemingly simple question but there is undoubtedly a more secular, more personal fascination with the eyes, an attachment to one’s human identity rather than to one’s spirituality or soul. Christine Slobogin reflects on one of the more peculiar conventions of medical photography in this month’s blog post – the first in a series showcasing current postgraduate research in medical humanities at Birkbeck.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |