Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from

Aaron Manky, listener discretion advised.

Hi, welcome to a very special episode of Noble Blood. I am so excited to be

joined here by Dr. Lindsey Fitzgeras, the amazing historian. She actually wrote a

book called The Butchering Art about the Scottish Surgeon Robert Lister, which

was a huge help for me as I was researching and writing my novel Anatomy

a Love Story, but she's written a new book, The Facemaker, a visionary

surgeon's battle to mend the disfigured soldiers of World War One all about

sort of, I would say the unsung hero of plastic surgery, Harold Gillies, who

just, I mean, from this book, I knew nothing about him. He's an incredible man.

Lindsey, hi, welcome. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm really excited to

talk to you about this. As you say, really kind of unknown story about the

grandfather of plastic surgery. So let's sort of back up a bit. How did you come

to this story? I asked myself that many times and it took five years to

research, right? So with The Butchering Art, which was about Victorian surgery and

all the horrible things we used to do before anesthesia and germ theory, you

don't have to navigate complications like patient confidentiality, which you

do in the 20th century. And I wasn't really prepared to take that on. What had

happened was I have a PhD in the history of science and medicine from Oxford, but

I call myself a storyteller these days. And I didn't know much about Harold

Gillies or were one, in fact, but I knew that there was a really harrowing

story there. And I knew that when I started the book, I wanted to drop the reader

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