The blast left Yeo severely disfigured, with the loss of both his upper and lower eyelids.
Thanks to Gillies pioneering work in reconstructive surgery, Yeo received a ground-breaking facial graft.
Yeo was among thousands of soldiers who had their faces reconstructed during and following World War One.
Facial injuries were difficult to treat on the front lines.
Surgeons would sometimes stitch together jagged wounds without accounting for the amount of tissue that had been lost.
As the scars healed, the flesh tightened, pulling the face into a permanent, grotesque grimace.
Others were blinded or left with a gaping hole where their nose had once been.
When these men returned home, they often faced stigma and isolation.
Determined to find better solutions, Gillies dedicated himself to developing innovative techniques for facial reconstruction.
Harold Gillies
However, the ward quickly proved insufficient to meet the growing demand.
There, Gillies and his team developed many of the foundational techniques of modern reconstructive surgery.
Gillies understood that healing a damaged face required more than simply covering woundsit meant restoring both structure and function.
His approach involved first repositioning any healthy tissue back to where it belonged.
Then, gaps left by injury could be filled with tissue transplanted from other parts of the body.
While surgeons already had some experience with skin grafts, Gillies refined these methods significantly.
Walter Yeo was among the first patients to benefit from this innovative method.
British and Indian wounded at Neuve Chapelle, on the way to the hospital base, 1915. like be advised these images are gruesome and too graphic to be included in this article.
Gillies continued to refine his techniques, often learning through trial and observation.
During the procedure, he observed that the edges of the skin flapwhen stretchedtended to curl inward.
To counter this, he stitched the edges together, forming a tube.
The techniques he developed would go on to influence generations of surgeons, extending far beyond the battlefield.
In the years following the war, Gillies continued to push the boundaries of what reconstructive surgery could achieve.
A few years later, he also assisted in one of the earliest male-to-female procedures.
In doing so, he helped lay the medical and ethical foundations for gender-affirming care today.
