This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies, in today for Terry Gross.

Injured war veterans are among societies most venerated figures, saluted and cheered at

parades for all their days.

But our guest Lindsay Fitzhars has the story of a cadre of seriously injured soldiers and

sailors who were treated differently.

The first world war brought a new kind of mechanized warfare, in which heavy artillery

flame throwers and chemical weapons inflicted ghastly wounds on combatants and left horrific

facial injuries on many who made it off the battlefield alive.

Fitzhars writes that in Great Britain, soldiers with gruesome facial wounds were not embraced

by civilians back home.

Fiancés broke off engagements, children fled at the site of their fathers, even some

medical personnel would turn away in horror.

Fitzhars' new book tells the story of a surgeon who made a specialty of treating facial

wounds at a time when plastic surgery was in its infancy.

He got the British War Office to establish a hospital to treat the injuries, and he

banned mirrors in some wards so the newly injured wouldn't be traumatized by their own

unrecognizable faces.

He spent the war replacing lost skin and restoring jaws, noses and teeth to give these

veterans a chance to return to civilian life.

Lindsay Fitzhars is a writer with a PhD in the history of science and medicine from the

University of Oxford.

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