Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator,

and my guest this week is the medical historian Lindsay Fitz-Harris,

whose new book is The Facemaker, One Surgeon's Battle to mend the disfigured soldiers of World War I.

It's a fascinating and often grisly and traumatizing area of medical history. Lindsay, what sent

you down this particular rabbit hole? Well, thanks so much for having me on the show. You know what,

Sam? I asked myself

that many times as I was writing this book. This took about five years to research and write.

And my first book, The Butchering Art, was about a Victorian surgeon named Joseph Lister,

whom some people know through the fame of Listerine, which he didn't create. Actually, it was

named for him, but not by him. And I decided to venture

into the 20th century, which is a medical historian, I had never done. So I didn't actually know that

much about Harold Gillies, the pioneering surgeon who rebuilt soldiers' faces during the First World War.

And I didn't even know that much about the First World War. But I knew that there was a really

harrowing story there that needed to be told in a bigger way. And I really wanted to set out

and throw the readers into the midst of the battle right off the start. And so I came across this

diary of a soldier named Private Percy Claire, who gets shot in the face in 1917, and he wrote

this extraordinary diary about his experiences. And so that's where

the story really starts. And we check in with him periodically throughout the facemaker. He gets sent to the

wrong hospital. There's various challenges along the way. And so I wanted people to really experience

those challenges through the eyes of someone who actually experienced them himself.

That's interesting. I was going to ask how you found Percy Stanley because he is a sort

...