ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the phenomenology of disgust and shame obliquely, through a particular historiographical aversion in the literature on the Great War. Facial disfigurement is rarely discussed outside the objective aims and contexts of clinical medicine and medical history. 1 I would like to take a more speculative approach to this historical subject by drawing material from contemporary journalistic representations of facial injury, personal reflections and photographic archives. One of the first things to be said about these very different sources is that they helped to render their subject invisible to all but a professional minority — to the extent that not looking defines the public response to facial disfigurement in wartime Britain. This paradoxical invisibility takes multiple forms: the absence of mirrors on facial wards; the physical and psychological isolation of patients with severe facial injuries; the eventual self-censorship afforded by developments in prosthetic ‘masks’; and an unofficial censorship of facially disfigured veterans in the British press and propaganda (Figure 12.1). Unlike amputees, these men were never celebrated as wounded heroes. The wounded face, I will argue, is not equivalent to the wounded body; it presents the trauma of mechanized warfare as a potentially contaminating — and shameful — loss of identity and humanity.
