Surgeon James Robb Church remembered:
“…some very wonderful work was done, and is being done, in the restoration to a semblance of something human those suffering from the terribly disfiguring wounds of the face. It is a little difficult in the quiet walks of peace to realize just what can happen to a man’s face as the result of shell wound and still leave him alive. Alive, but a living horror to all who see him and he himself, a despondent wretch. If you can figure to yourself what a man is with no nose, with no lower jaw, or only half a one, with a face that looks like a mangled beefsteak, you can appreciate what it means to patiently build him up again almost from the beginning and turn him out, scarred and seamed to be sure, but not an object that children would run from screaming. It is a work that calls for infinite patience, both on the part of the operator and the wounded man, for this is not done at one fell swoop, but means many weary months and sometimes as many as twenty or thirty operations. They borrow pieces of rib and bits of shin-bone and make new noses of them; they twist and pull and coax adjacent tissue until it covers the gaps and they bridge in vacant areas by skin grafts until finally the unfortunate wretch comes forth somewhere in the shape that God made him.” The Doctor’s Part: What Happens to the Wounded in War, 73-75.