Gillies in America

Shortly after the First World War, in November 1920, Harold Gillies made his first of several lecture tours to America.

Harold Gillies made four major lecture tours to America, the first in 1920 and then again in 1934, 1941 and 1947.  His first tour is thought to have been organised by Eastman Sheehan and Ferris Smith, two American colleagues who had visited him at the Queens Hospital just before the end of the war. Sailing from Southampton he arrived with 700 glass lantern slides. Grand Rapids, Minnesota was the first venue, actually the basement of an ordinary house, not a formal lecture theatre. It was on this night, during a celebration after his lecture that Gillies learned of the Ukrainian surgeon Filatov beating him to publication of the tube pedicle flap in a short paper published in 1917. It came as quite a shock to Gillies.

1934 saw him visit Boston, Massachusetts as guest of honour at a Congress of 1500 American surgeons. Gillies had a habit of exceptionally poor timekeeping, and on this trip he wandered into the lecture theatre to see his slides already being projected at the direction of the session chair. He was never late again! Later in this visit he was taken by pioneer American plastic surgeon, Varaztad Kazanjian to see the annual Harvard versus Yale American football match known as “The Game”.

October 1941 saw Gillies third tour. This time invited to an Ear Nose and Throat conference in Chicago.  Crossing the Atlantic was perilous at this time during the Second World War and he spent several days in Lisbon, Portugal waiting for a seat on the sea plane to New York. He was accompanied by Percy Hennell, pioneer of colour photography who had taken many images of injured servicemen and the work that Gillies and colleagues in other units were undertaking. Many of these are in the BAPRAS Collection. Hennell was to manage the slide projection and the technicolour film Gillies took to show the phases of the blitz and its victims. Despite the last-minute provision of a projector, Gillies gave his lecture to 2000 American surgeons, showing the film, 75 slides and speaking for an hour and ¾. He received wild applause and acclamation.

The British Council then unexpectedly asked him to go on to Latin America. So in late October 1941 he set off with his party, now including his daughter, who was serving in the United States, for Texas and then Mexico. He lectured in Galveston to medical students, then dental surgeons in Houston before arriving in Mexico City on November 2. From there he travelled on to commitments in Lima ,Peru, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Montevideo in Uruguay, and Rio De Janeiro Brazil, lecturing to the Surgical society there wearing his robes of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. One more, stop in Sao Paulo preceded his voyage back to England, having been away three months and travelling some 27,000 miles.

Gillies made one last trip, in the spring of 1947. Invited by the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, in April he sailed on the steamship Mauritania, this time accompanied by four other British plastic surgeons. It was perhaps the first such British delegation to an overseas meeting. The others, all “second generation” surgeons, were Rainsford Mowlem, Rowland Osborne, Jeffrey Fitzgibbon, Joseph Reidy and John Grocott, accompanied by Mowlem and Grocott’s wives. Their arrival, together with wartime fighter race Douglas Bader, coincidently on the ship, hit the headlines. The New York Times announced “Legless British Air Hero and Group of Plastic Surgeons Among the Arrivals”. They went first to Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, before going on to Memphis, sufficiently honoured guests to deserve a bus accompanied by police motorbike outriders. All six British surgeons gave papers to the conference including Mowlem’s “Observations in the treatment of lymphoedema”. They then split up, having been invited to  various units all over the United States and Canada, travelling home independently.

Today, the United States is the dominant force in World Plastic Surgery. But it was not always so.  The American's visits to Gillies at Sidcup, and his subsequent lecture tours spawned a rich legacy of collaboration and mutual development with the Americas which are sustained today.