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

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One wall of Ladd’s studio was decorated with rows of plaster casts; finished plates were arranged on a makeshift tablecloth with a vase of lilies. This plaster mask would then be coated with silver and painted to match the texture and tone of the patient’s skin. Suzannah Biernoff looks back at the surgeons and sculptors involved in the experimental work of facial reconstruction.

And while most prosthetic masks were held in place with wire-rim eyeglasses, thin wire or ribbon could also be used. Ladd and her associates took over a large fifth-floor artist’s studio in the Latin Quarter: a bright, high-ceilinged room decorated with posters, flowers and an American flag. 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. She is currently working on a history of imperfection, tracing connections between early twentieth-century plastic surgery and psychotherapy, changing understandings of disability, and contemporary discussions of self-care and authenticity. After all, this was a time when the most advanced cosmetic surgical procedure was the repair of a cleft lip.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. Her publications, focusing on ideas of the body and the self, include ‘Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages’ and ‘Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement’.

Ladd’s work was greatly appreciated by both the wounded soldiers and the American and French military organizations. Arguing that imperfection is a foundational modern idea, the book will suggest new ways of thinking about the cultural preference for flawless perfection. 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. It was painstaking detailed and painted to match the soldier’s skin color, often while the man was wearing the mask, so the tone would work in sunny and cloudy weather, even capturing the bluish tinge of a man’s freshly-shaved cheeks. In a silent film commissioned by the American Red Cross, the studio at 70 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs comes to life.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. With her skills and artistic training, Ladd, age 39 at the time and living in Paris, believed she could do the same for the men for whom masks were the last resort.

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. Soldiers with no experience in trench warfare popped their heads above the trenches, thinking they could duck back quickly enough to avoid the hail of machine gun fire. Little more than a thin curve of skin, it fails to do justice to Ladd’s artistry and her legacy in restoring self-respect and honor to those World War I soldiers with the “broken faces,” as captured in one patient’s letter to her: “The woman I love no longer finds me repulsive, as she had the right to do. A handful of these photographs record the laborious crafting of facial prosthetics undertaken by the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, who had persuaded the commanding officer of the Third London General Hospital in Wandsworth to let him make bespoke masks for severely disfigured servicemen. 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.His compatriots seem just as comfortable in the company of Ladd’s assistants, nodding and chatting while the sculptors make adjustments. One of them takes the cigarette from his mouth, reaches behind his ear and, with a smile, removes his chin. As Official Photographer of Great Britain during World War I, Horace Nicholls was commissioned to make a record of the war at home: the great munitions factories and shipyards, training camps, new recruits and soldiers on leave.

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. Facial masks, patches and artificial noses had been made for centuries to cover the disfiguring injuries caused by disease and combat. 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. The daughter of well-to-do Bryn Mawr socialites, Anna Coleman Ladd was educated in Paris and Rome, where she studied neoclassical sculpture.Before the modern age facial reconstruction and plastic surgery, Anna Coleman Ladd was one of a handful of unique artisans in World War I who created highly detailed masks to hide severely mutilated soldiers’ facial wounds. It wasn’t unusual for new patients making their way to Ladd’s Parisian studio to find themselves in rooms and hallways lined with row after row of plaster casts and masks in progress. HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” character Richard Harrow portrayed one of the war veterans who came home with “broken faces. Nicholls and Wood were most likely unaware of this longer history of facial repair, but they would have been attuned to the stigma of the missing or sunken nose associated with syphilis.