Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper : How Art and Archives Defined Second World War Reconstructive Surgery in Britain

An interdisciplinary approach to medical history that shows the key role that drawings and photographs had in shaping the material, professional, emotional and aesthetic parameters of plastic surgery.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to medical history, this book shows the key role that drawings and photographs had in shaping the material, professional, emotional and aesthetic parameters of reconstructive plastic surgery in Britain during the 20th century.


Plastic surgery in twentieth-century Britain was a medical discipline with deep ties to art, artists and art history. It was also a field still in the process of creating its reputation and its archives. Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper examines these archives, focusing in particular on the works on paper held within these collections by two artists: Diana "Dickie" Orpen and Percy Hennell. Plastic surgeons depended upon the drawings and photographs made by these and other medical illustrators to craft certain narratives about their field and their surgical practice.

In addition to telling an art history of plastic surgery during this period, Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper engages with the affective parameters of archival objects, and with what working as a historian involves when done within potentially traumatic spaces. Paying particular attention to the emotional dimensions and effects of this visual culture and the ways in which it is archived and framed by the discipline of plastic surgery - then and now - Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper explores not only what it meant to make art in a surgical space, but also what it means to study these affecting paper objects in the archive today.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.