The Tin Nose Shop: a BBC Radio 2 Book Club Recommended Read

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First used on the battlefields of WWI, machine guns, with their rapid fire and long range, were positively deadly, killing or wounding roughly 60,000 British soldiers at the Battle of the Somme in just one day.

Funded and administered by the American Red Cross, it was a restful place where she and four assistants often worked for weeks to produce a single prosthetic mask. An official war artist for the Royal Army Medical Corps, Lobley portrays individual faces, some of them visibly scarred. These strange, exquisite artefacts are an object lesson in how the war-damaged face was understood at the time as a psychological and social wound. Over the course of two years, Ladd’s studio produced 185 masks — a number that pales compared to World War I’s estimated 20,000 facial casualties. Paré’s writings contain illustrations of enamelled eyes, prosthetic ears and noses, palatal obturators (which covered an opening in the roof of the mouth), mechanical limbs and an artificial penis crafted from wood or tin.Wood’s department was for those patients whose faces remained so irreparably disfigured despite facial surgery they were deemed unsuitable for routine pre- and post-op photographs. Today, none of Ladd’s prosthetic masks are known to survive except a small cheek prosthesis included in a 2016 exhibition in England. While some masks were full-face, most covered just those areas that were damaged — perhaps a chin and one cheek, or a nose and an eye. Ladd recollected that the men, who often arrived with flowers, would stay on for a game of dominoes or checkers: “The blind ones played dominoes and the others checkers.

A talented young sculptor, Anna Ladd delighted in creating light hearted scenes of children at play. Tonks never thought of these intimate drawings as ‘war art’, but they portray the violence of war – and the transformative impact of injury – in a way that still has the power to shock. The daughter of well-to-do Bryn Mawr socialites, Anna Coleman Ladd was educated in Paris and Rome, where she studied neoclassical sculpture. In 1932 she was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor — the highest French decoration and among the most famous in the world.Suzannah Biernoff looks back at the surgeons and sculptors involved in the experimental work of facial reconstruction. Until his last few scenes, we always saw Harrow wearing an expressionless tin mask molded to his face, painted to match his skin, and held in place with eyeglasses. Ladd made it her mission to fashion masks so those soldiers could once again appear in public without shocking and being subjected to the horrified stares of passersby. Ladd wrote of one of her first patients, “He had worn his mask constantly and was still wearing it in spite of the fact it was very battered and looked awful.

During World War I facial injury was often portrayed as the “worst loss of all” – a loss not just of appearance, but of identity, and even humanity. The 16th-century French surgeon Ambroise Paré tells the story of a young man whose silver nose is a source of hilarity among his friends.One of them takes the cigarette from his mouth, reaches behind his ear and, with a smile, removes his chin. Ladd’s work was greatly appreciated by both the wounded soldiers and the American and French military organizations. Its director, Anna Coleman Ladd, had established a name for herself as a sculptor before the war, with portrait commissions from society figures, including prima ballerina Anna Pavlova. Wood and his colleagues would painstakingly recreate the patient’s original appearance from remaining features and pre-injury photographs.