Stuff You Should Know - What were war masks?

Episode Date: November 6, 2018

War masks were made for soldiers in WWI who had horrible accidents that left their faces sometimes unrecognizable. Though it may seem rudimentary today, they went a long way in restoring their dignity. Learn all about them today.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know. The, I don't know what edition this is. It's a good one though, I predict. Yeah, I didn't know much about this, so I was, when I found it, I was like, wow, this is right up our alley. Yeah, this is part of what's very frequently called a hidden history of World War One. This is not something that a lot of people have known about for very long, although it

seems to be picking up kind of academic interest. But this idea of people who were disfigured in the war, suffered facial disfigurements. And I should say, I want to say now before, at the outset, facial differences is the preferred term. Right. And there's like a whole, there's a whole sea change going on and perception, and just being out there with facial differences, it's like the antithesis of what we're about to talk about.

Right. So hats off to that. But this was a time when there was a huge sudden uptick in facial disfigurements, is what they call them, from being at war. Yeah, I mean, World War One was a brand new war. The Industrial Revolution brought on new, horrific ways to kill people. Like the machine gun? The machine gun.

Mortar shells? And in trench warfare, they point out in both of these articles that I read that people, the soldiers at the time, still didn't have a full understanding of just what machine gun meant. Right. And that you don't have time to go poke your head above the trench and look real quick. Like those bullets are faster than you. Right.

And you will get a face full of them. Right. And you're not dodging one bullet. There's a bunch of them coming. Yeah. Maybe you get out of the way of one, but there's three more headed your way too. Yeah. I mean, it sounds weird to think of that now, but there was not that full understanding.

And a lot of men in World War One had a lot of bad things happen to their face. Yeah. So not just from machine gun fire, from sticking their head up above a trench, but also from those mortar shells. Yeah, artillery. They'd been around for a little while, but they just prior to World War One had really been perfected into like really destructive instruments. They blew up and they created a totally different type of wound than a bullet hole does because

they're jagged pieces of metal, iron, steel, and they could, say, tear your lower jaw completely off. Yeah. Take off half of your face. Like they just did all sorts of really weird, horrible things. And that advancement in weaponry, I guess you'd call it, combined with some advancements in battlefield emergency medicine so that... Saving lives.

Yeah. So that there were worse wounds than ever before, but the potential of surviving a wound like that was also greater than ever before, which culminated in a huge uptick in people whose faces had been disfigured by either bullets or shrapnel, more than anyone had ever seen before as far as numbers went. Yeah. There are a couple of doctors in these articles that have quotes and one of them talked about... We didn't see a broken bone.

We saw bones that were just shattered. At the time, I think another quote talked about the weaponry was outpacing medicine. And like you said, they were maybe able to save lives more, but it was outpacing like, well, now what do we do? We don't have the means to do facial reconstruction like they will in the future. And in a very weird, but also really real way, World War I pushed reconstructive surgery to advance by leaps and bounds, just by all of a sudden having a bunch of people to practice on and try new techniques on, but also having to do that all of a sudden, rather than slowly

taking your time. It was like, no, you need to figure this out now. And a lot of surgical techniques advanced, but a lot of people point to World War I as kind of the dividing line between anything that came before as far as plastic surgery goes and modern plastic surgery really started in World War I. But people have been doing stuff as far as plastic surgery goes for more than a thousand years before World War I, or no, about almost 3,000 years, 2,500, 3,500, 3,500 years at least. That's as far as I'm going.

I'm the worst at figuring out time spans over centuries. As you know, that's why I never do it. You always leave it to me. I usually just say the year and you're like, you can figure it out how long ago that was. But about 1,600 BCE is when we have evidence on paper or papyri, papery, of actual repairing things on the face like that and suturing things on the face. And I believe there was a Hindu doctor named Susrata who developed the first rhinoplasty. Yeah.

Because in India, especially during this time, like I think this is about... This is 500 BCE. So about 2,500 years ago. If you were caught stealing, you would get your nose lopped off. You could also get it lopped off in war. And it happened frequently enough that it was an Indian doctor at that time who created the technique of building a new nose. Your nose could also just fall off if it was the 1,700s and you had syphilis.

Yes. Can you imagine something like that? No. It sounds awful. It would drive you in crazy, it'd attack your spine, but there were also these necrotic lesions called gummos or gummas. Isn't that an awful name for something that eats your face away? A gumma?

Yes. Oh, I got a new gumma today. Look at this thing. Yeah. But it would eat your nose clear off. It would eat your eye out of its socket. It would eat your mouth away. And the prevalence of syphilis actually was something that kind of pushed plastic surgery

along as well. Yeah. They started experimenting with skin grafting in the early 1800s. The term plastic surgery didn't actually come about until the 1800s, but I can't imagine the results were great, but they were leading the way all over the world with some things like skin grafts and plastic surgery, very rudimentary and crude, but it did pave the way. Yeah, they were figuring out techniques, but again, they didn't have something like World

War I to push things for them. They had syphilis, which is something, but they had like cleft palates was one. That was a surgery that had been not perfected or anything like that, but it was a surgery you'd frequently see if you were a surgeon that you might be asked to do. Right. World War I, again, just brought on a drove of totally different cases that no one had ever seen before, so they had to get clever. And there were a couple of people who kind of came to the fore just as far as the plastic

surgery went. There was a guy from New Zealand named Gillies. What was his first name, Chuck? Mickey. You knew I was going to say that, right? Yeah. Now, his name was Sir Harold Gillies. Yeah.

There were a few people, and we'll talk about all of them kind of as we go here, but Sir Harold Gillies, there was a gentleman named Francis Derwent Wood, and then there was a woman named Anna Coleman Ladd, and they all contributed greatly to this new cause of this really, really sad cause of these men coming home with these really terrible things that have happened to their face. And not only like I'm shunned by society, but like my kids can't look at me, my wife wants to leave me, and some of these soldiers are like, and she rightfully should want to leave me.

Like how can she even look at me? Right. And it was just such an awful thing to have to live with. And they all chipped in to, I mean, I call them war masks, basically, like these wound masks, and they would make, and if you see the pictures of these, it's amazing. They, these before and after photos, they would make masks, and we'll get into the nitty-gritty, but essentially masks to cover these, what they called then disfigurements, whether it was a missing eye, a missing nose, the lower half of your jaw.

So it wouldn't be something you wore over your entire face, it would just be the part that they needed. Right. So initially it was, okay, we can advance plastic surgery, and that's where Harold Gillies came in. He founded a hospital at Sid Cup, which is outside of London, from what I understand. And it was, that was where you would go if you were British to get your, to get plastic surgery.

And you could go stay there for like two years, basically getting a series of surgery and a series of surgery, just one after the other, recovering new surgery, recovering new surgery. And if they couldn't quite do it, they would send you over to Francis Derwent Wood, who we'll talk about in a second, but there were, there were limits to plastic surgery. And when plastic surgery reached its limits, and I guess the soldier's face was still disfigured to the point where he didn't feel like he could return to society, or society was like, Dan, and you stay over there, then Francis Derwent Wood and Anna Coleman Lad came into play.

Yeah. He wrote, Gillies wrote, and he pioneered a lot of work that they say is still important to modern plastic surgery. And he ended up writing a book, and he was the guy that said, you know, before this, we were doing things like cleft palates, and all of a sudden we were getting 2,000 patients a day coming in with the most horrific injuries you could imagine. And he ended up writing a book called Plastic Surgery of the Face, and if you look at this book, and this article rightfully points out, it's, it really demonstrates how far they

had come and what they were able to do, but also what they weren't able to do at all at the same time. Yeah. Like their limitations, even though he was doing, for the time, really, really advanced work. You're like, you cut out a piece of skin and sew it to another part of your skin so that there's blood flow, and then you cut off where it was originally connected, and then sew that part down, and basically you just inchworm skin down the face to where

you want it. Like they were figuring out things like you have to keep a blood supply going or else it's going to just rot and fall off. Yeah. Like really advanced stuff. Like, in a lot of cases, they were able to restore the soldier's face basically back to where some close similarity to what it was prior to the injury. But again, there were plenty of them where it was just like, we can't do anything for

you, man. And that's when they would go. It was when those cases started to build up, Francis Derwent Wood and Anna Coleman Ladd stepped in. Should we take a break? Yeah. Let's take a break right now. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So one thing I want to mention real quick is, uh, I don't think we talked about was

outside Sid Cup or in Sid Cup where Gillies had his hospital. Uh, they had, there were so many men coming through there. They had in the town, they had certain benches painted where they painted blue. Yeah. And if there was a bench painted blue, it was sort of a, I guess you, for lack of a better word, a warning to society, like here's where these patients will be sitting and you might want to not sit there and look at them. Right.

It was like a horrible thing to do, but it was just sort of emblematic of like what these men had to go through. Like children terrified in public of these people, like they wouldn't put mirrors in these hospitals. Well, yeah. And it was supposedly it was an enormous shock to see yourself. I can't even imagine it. Like I can't imagine what it would be like to see your face like missing major features

because it, and this was a recurring theme that I saw in a lot of the, um, like academic coverage of this is like on the one hand, what these people were doing was like really great and noble and they were trying to help these people regain their identity. But at the other, it's kind of like, um, what does it say about society that like these people couldn't come back because they were missing like an eye or a mouth or something like that. You know? Right.

Like stay in your house. We don't, I don't want my kid to see this. That kind of thing. Yeah. There's a complicated thing going on here. It's complex. It's not just cut and dry. Like that was wrong.

This guy was missing a face. Gotta have a face. He made him a mask to cover up his deformity. Yeah. Um, it was, there's more to it than that. You know? I mean, we're at a place now where we're making great strides and acceptance of, of stuff like this.

But imagine it's still bad. Imagine what it was like back then. Have you seen that movie, Wonder? No. Oh, so good. It's so sweet. It's like, um, I'm a little boy with facial differences and like going from home school to school.

Yeah. It's heartbreakingly sweet. Yeah. Owen Wilson's dad doing his own Wilson thing. Julie Roberts plays his mom. She's great. It's a great movie we're seeing. Um, but yeah, there's a, there's a whole movement going on.

I follow this, this account. I think there might be British called changing faces and they're all just like out, out and proud. Like this is my face. Like I'm, I'm sorry. I'm, I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to do anything about it. Um, you know, let's, let's move from there.

Yeah. And, uh, it's neat. It's neat to see just that, that change, that huge shift from Hugo stay over here out of society. Like society doesn't really feel like it can ask that of people any longer. Whereas before it was like, my wife can't even look at me. She's repulsed by me and she, she deserves to be. That's a huge change, you know, and I think that's wonderful.

Well, and it was also the same time where you would, uh, where a Kennedy would get lobotomized and stuffed in a, in a insane asylum forever, never to be talked about again, or, you know, people committed family members like a dark time for humanity. And we're just now coming out of it a little bit. Well, we've come a long way since then obviously, but it's just amazing how many, I don't know how much of this stuff still goes on sad. Should we talk about the masks? Oh yeah.

So if, if Harold Gillies couldn't do anything for you, um, you would move on to Francis Derwent Wood, who was an artist, if there ever was one. Yes. So he had a shop, uh, called the 10 noses shop. Yeah. He didn't call it that. He didn't? I don't know.

He may have facetiously, but it was the Tommy's, the wounded British soldiers who called it that. Yeah. T-I-N, as in, you don't have a nose. Here's one made of 10. Right. So yeah, they called it the 10 noses shop. Yeah.

But technically, but the official name was the masks for facial disfigurement department. Yes. And it was, it was founded by Francis Derwent Wood, who, um, he was, like I said, he was an artist and he, um, enlisted as a private in the medical corps age 44. Yeah. Which is, uh, obviously, especially back then kind of old to do something like that. Yeah. Uh, he found pretty quickly that he didn't get a great duty.

He was, um, he described it as Aaron boy chores and he had a knack though. He was an artist. So he had a knack for coming up with some pretty ingenious things. At first it was splints, uh, that were apparently pretty creative and sophisticated. And then those chattering teeth that just made everybody laugh. Those are his. Well, why was that ever a thing? I don't know.

Was that supposed to be funny? I guess. Look at those teeth chatter. 70s. I guess so. I was in the pet rock, which by the way, I want to do a show on that. Is there a show's worth the material or is that like a short stuff, do you think? I don't know.

We'll find out. Yeah. That's a nice tease. Maybe we'll come up with a third podcast called somewhere in between stuff. It's exactly 23 minutes. Exactly. Um, so yeah, he was doing Aaron boy stuff, had a lot of creativity. I guess he caught the eye, uh, of the people there.

And as an artist, they said, you know what? You could actually be very useful in, uh, constructing this kind of new idea, which are these, um, these, and again, that's what they call them back then, like disfigurement masks. Um, they had stuff, they had prosthetics before facial prosthetics, but they were made of rubber. They weren't very good. They, the aesthetically, they were, they were utilitarian.

Yeah. They were, they were meant to maybe help you chew again if you were missing your lower jaw. Yeah. Um, whatever. They were meant to solve the problem of the missing function. This is the opposite of that. Yeah.

This is cosmetic. I guess you would call it. Very much so. Yeah. Cosmetic. Francis Derwent Wood said, like, I'm, like, I'm not trying to restore function. That's not the point of what I'm doing. Um, what I'm doing is restoring identity.

Somebody put it that he was making portraits out of metal. Yeah. They called them portrait masks, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then putting them onto the person to, to basically restore their look back to what it was pre-war. Yes, and they were also very intent at, at Wood's shop of, um, treating these men with

dignity and respect, um, to, uh, I think one of the nurses even talked about how beautiful a face without a nose was. She was a sculptor. Was she? Yeah. It was Kathleen Scott, who was the widow of Robert Scott, Robert Falcon Scott, who died in Antarctica on an expedition, but she was a, she was a sculptor who helped out and was like, these are people still and they're beautiful in their own way.

Yeah. Her quote was, uh, men without noses are very beautiful, like antique marbles, which I mean, all of us have seen antique marbles all the time, so you know exactly what she meant. Uh, they also said it would shop to always look a man straight in the face. Yeah. Remember, he's watching your face to see how you're going to react. So it started when they first would come in there with being treated like a human being,

right? Uh, which really is, is great. So, uh, he would establish his unit in March, 1916 and, uh, by June of the following year, he appeared, uh, in the Lancet, the great legendary British medical journal that's still around today. And then eventually at the end, toward the end of 1917, there was a Boston based sculptor in the United States, obviously, uh, in her, uh, previously to being married. She was Anna Coleman Watts and she was, uh, very talented as a sculptor and eventually

married a man named Maynard Ladd who was a physician and he moved to France with him because he got a gig with the Red Cross. Yeah. He was, uh, like the injured children's core leader, something like that. Man, what a thing to do. Um, and yeah, so they moved to France and she found out what Francis Derwent Wood was doing back in England and she's like, I'm going to try that here. So with the Red Cross, she set up something called the, um, Studio for Portrait Masks

in Paris in the Latin Quarter and she went to work doing the same thing. Again, this is all pioneering stuff. Like these people were making this up as they went along. There were a couple of trained sculptors who turned during the war, turned their talents to restoring facial identity to men whose faces had been disfigured by shrapnel and bullets. Yeah. And by all accounts, um, the, uh, Ladd's studio was very much the same way of like trying

to set them up for success as humans and treating them with dignity. Her place in the Latin Quarter was very beautiful. It was described as a large, bright studio, uh, plants and ivy on the walls and flowers everywhere. And she wanted to make it like, I think it's a, it's significant that these were artists and not from the medical establishment because they wanted to set up these beautiful places for these men to come and feel good about what's going on there. And I think at the time, like hospitals were grim and any kind of treatment you got was

just, I mean, we've talked a lot about old medicine. It was not a sunny, uh, experience in any way. Then those horrid like wicker wheelchairs that are the creepiest things ever, anyone's ever seen. Yeah. So Ladd tried to set up a really lovely, cheery welcoming space for her patients to come in, which is just great. And there's newsreel footage from that era of Ladd working in her studio with one of

her patient clients, I don't know what you'd call him. But I think he's missing a substantial part of his lower face, maybe his lower jaw. And she attaches the prosthetic, the mask, and like tucks it behind his ears, like it hangs on behind his ears, right? And, um, it's, it's the neatest thing. Like he smiles, like he goes from not sad but neutral, but then all of a sudden he smiles and it's like it was a warm, genuine smile. And it's, it's really moving because you can read about all this like we did.

All you want. And like, oh, here's this quote from this person and this person said, this was an amazing thing too. And here's a letter somebody wrote, we're seeing that guy smile when, when, um, when Anna Coleman Ladd puts the, the prosthetic on his face, says it all, like it all comes into focus what everybody in the articles are talking about. Yeah. And there are a lot of great before and after photos of the, and we'll get in, you know,

in a few minutes on how they made these things, but there are a lot of great before and after photos. And when you look at these, because initially in today's, in 2018, as you think about, well, these people had a horrific thing happen to their face. And so now they wear a mask, like attached by either eyeglasses or hooked over their ears to, to mesh with the rest of their face and your first thought is like, how unbelievable did that look? But when you look at these photos, they look really good.

And you can only imagine that just that sense of, uh, normalcy for lack of a better word meant so much to these men. Yeah. Even covering it up, not fixing it, but just covering it up enough to, to blend in, I think is what they were looking for. Pretty extraordinary. Yeah. You want to take another break?

Yeah. Let's do it. We're going to take a break, everybody. We just decided, I don't know if you heard or not, and here we go. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. It was our AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist.

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the nineties. Listen to Hey Dude, the nineties called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So let's talk about how these masks were made. Again, they were revolutionary.

These people were making it up as they were going along, um, but they hit upon it pretty well right out of the gate. And the big, one of the big differences was that these weren't rubber prosthetics that were meant to restore function. They were metal masks that were meant to restore identity. Yeah. And a little dignity maybe. Yeah.

Um, so the first thing that would happen is, uh, lad or, you know, whoever's working on this, cause they all, uh, lad and would both had people they worked with on their teams. So the first thing they would do is get a photo, obviously, more than one photo of pre-war and what they look like. Cause the whole thing is, I don't want to make you look like you looked before. That just, well, let me just fashion you a nose. Sure. It's like, I want your nose to look like you're old nose.

Right. And, uh, so they would get these photos that the people, uh, the patients and soldiers would have to heal completely, uh, in order to undergo this process at all. Like, it's not the kind of thing they could do, you know, as they're healing. Uh, and so they made a plaster cast and then after that, they would make what's called a squeeze, which is like a clay version of that cast. And then eventually that would end up in a galvanized copper mask about the thickness of like a playing card.

Right. And the plaster cast that they would make of your face was supposedly just an awful, awful process. Sure. Like they would give you a little straw to put in your mouth and like, that's how you breathed for as long as they were, they took to make the plaster cast. Yeah. It was pretty bad.

It'd be bad anyway, but after you've suffered that trauma to your face, imagine anything near or around your face would be really, uh, disconcerting. Yeah. And let's talk about that. What led up to that? First of all, you were shot in the face or hit with shrapnel in the face. Sometimes you would be laying there if you went down in no man's land for hours, days before somebody came and got you.

You were taken to a, um, field hospital and then flown over to England or driven over to England or by boat, be quiet everybody, um, or taken to Paris, um, and you underwent possibly two years of surgical reconstruction and then finally, once all your surgeries were healed, you would find yourself in a Mrs. Ladd studio or Francis or went wood studio, getting plaster coated over your disfigured face, holding a little straw in your mouth. Yeah. So yeah, it was, it was probably not the greatest thing that they've ever experienced. It was probably tied for first with a couple of those other ones along the way for being

terrible. Yeah. And like you said, this is after, um, noble, but not great result, uh, attempts at, you know, doing it, the plastic surgery way. Right. So these people are desperate. They, I mean, if you've gone in there to get a portrait mask, you're, that's your last stop to try and resume, uh, you know, your previous life basically.

Sure. Right. Or as close as you can get to it. That's a big caveat. So if you had facial hair, if you had a moustache, which, uh, a lot of men did back then, um, they would use real hair and add that into the mask, uh, her, I think it took her about a month to make one of these. Yeah.

I don't know if you said or not, but she was credited as by far being the better artist. Like the results were really talented, much better coming out of the Ladd studio than out of the wood studio. Yeah. But he was faster and more prolific. Yeah. He had a lot more, I think he served a lot more patients. Uh, in the end, I believe her shop was only open about a year and with four assistants

created 185 masks, which, um, again, in the grand scheme of things is not very many people, but changed all of those lives. Right. You know, so they, so they're from the plaster cast, you said they made a squeeze, a cast is a negative, the squeeze is a positive and then they would use the squeeze as the model for making the cast or the mask that they needed, um, and then they would, they would cast it into, um, copper one 32nd of an inch thick and then it, like you said, it would attach by, um, spectacles or around the ear and Mrs. Ladd, you said she used hair, but

wood used like he painted his on. Yeah. And so when you go to look up these photos, they'll have the before and after and on the left, you know, it's sometimes you can't even tell what this man might have previously looked like. Oh man. And so you look at the right. Yeah.

And then it looks, you know, it's a mask, but you're like, you can tell that that's what this guy looked like. And it's like, it really is true, the, the loss of identity that must happen or must have happened at least back then. Um, and I'm sure now too, where if you undergo a facial trauma, it's amazing what, how true drastically it can change how you look your face. It just changes from what it was before when you see some of the before before pictures. So before the injury, then after the injury and then after the mask that before the injury

and then after the injury picture, sometimes you're like, how, like, I don't see that person in there at all. So yeah, I can imagine, like we said, they kept mirrors out of the ward because seeing yourself like that, especially if you were in the process of undergoing surgery, I'm sure they were like, you don't need to see this at all, buddy, just, just let us keep working on you. You know? Yeah.

One of the, the tougher parts of this process too, and, um, and also most important was matching the skin tone. So obviously if you have a mask that doesn't look like your other skin tone on the rest of your face, then it's going to stand out more and your whole point was to blend in. So she would save it that for last and actually fit the mask on the man and, and paint it while it was on their face. So she could match it as exactly as possible. Right.

I think used a couple of different oil paints at first, didn't work out. Yeah, they chipped. Yeah. And then landed on enamel, which is, and these things still, you know, we should say it's not like it would last 20 years, like they were, you know, to mask you where every day. So it would get beat up over the years and, you know, wear and tear happened for sure. Um, one of the other things with the paint too was apparently the hue was really difficult because on like an overcast day, it might look really lifelike, but then that same hue

in sunlight looked like dead. So they had to like kind of split the difference between the two. So from what I saw, the paint getting the good complexion right was the hardest part for sure. But yeah, those masks supposedly had a life expectancy of just about a couple of years. But the thing is, is after the war, um, wood studio closed down and so did lads. Um, and so these men, that was it. They got their masks.

It was almost like this weird little popup that happened that went away and never came back. So these men, you know, clung to their masks for as long as they could. And so much so that, um, they, they're, they're basically aren't any of those masks. No one is like, Oh, this is a World War one, um, portrait mask. Right. Those are all buried with their owners because those masks became part of their public identity as well.

Yeah. I bet you there's got to be one somewhere, right? Surely. But I think most of them are probably buried with their owners. And these, like I said, with lad only 185 masks, you were very lucky if you were able to get one of these. Yeah. Um, I believe they estimated 20,000 fate, what they called facial casualties in World

War one alone. Right. So out of that number to only get 185 from like the best artists working is not very many people. And they think Francis to went would created more, um, just because he was open longer and he was more prolific or he's faster, but, um, they don't have a number. But even still, even if he made three times that, that's nothing compared to how many people have become facially disfigured from injury or injuries.

Right. Yeah. And lad, um, she was lauded. She did a lot of interviews when she got back to the United States in 1932. She was made a chevalier. Nice touch. Is that right? Yeah.

Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. And, uh, she just went back to her, you know, her art when she got back to the United States. Yeah. This, this, I want to say this awesome Smithsonian article by Carolyn Alexander who talks about this. Yeah. It's good. It mentions that her busts, like she was a sculptor and before her work in the war and

after her work in the war, it's actually really kind of generic portraits of people. Yeah. Like it lacks like the pizzazz and like the human like touch that her actual wartime mask efforts had. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah. It's cool.

I like her busts. I liked, I liked her style. Yeah. Weirdly like early 20th century modern. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. She died in 1939.

She died young. She died at 60 in Santa Barbara. Francis Derwent Wood died also young. 55. Yeah. 55 years old in 1926 in London. And he was remembered obviously post war as well, which is great. Public monuments, war memorials and the machine gun core and Hyde Park corner in London is

apparently where one of the most poignant war memorials for him lays. Yeah. And like you said, I mean 20,000 of these injuries and only say several hundred of them received masks. And again, this is a time when society didn't really want you back if you were officially disfigured in the war. So sad. And there was a, there was an idea to basically buy some land for disfigured officers to have

them just basically go live off the land over here and have a nice pension and just stay over here. And those plans didn't come to fruition. And so they were just kind of expected to just go fade away. Just go away. We don't want to see you. In Australia, apparently they had a lot of facially disfigured soldiers returning home. A lot of them would just go out and live in the bush.

Yeah. You know, it'd be like living in the woods in England or the U.S. is, okay, I'm going to go live in the woods now because you guys don't want to see my face anymore. And a lot of them committed suicide too, said to say, or died of suspicious accidental deaths. Yeah. I mean, like the stories where you hear about their kids being frightened of their father and stuff after the war, just heartbreaking. Yeah.

And that was supposedly a pretty recurrent anecdote in newspaper articles about this, about these studios. Like they're trying to save people because their own kids can't stand to be around them, you know? And the kids even scared of the mask because, you know, it points out is while they did so much to restore it, they were still expressionless faces, which, you know, could creep out a kid for sure. Yes.

But we've come a long way. Yes. And wonder is proof positive of that. Great. Go see that movie. It's good. I will. If you want to know more about facial differences, go check out, I don't know, just search Facial

Differences. Check out changingfaces.org and go see Wonder. Why not? It's a good movie. I'll check it out. That was the second one was directed to everybody. Oh, OK. Since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this relative of President Pierce here. Whoa. I'm in trouble. Parentheses lighthearted. Oh, OK. Good. I'm not. Hey, guys.

Big fan. I had a baby in August, so I've been behind on the episodes, finally got to these new short stuff where you mentioned President Franklin Pierce and I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I heard you're disdain for the band. My baby son's middle name is actually Pierce, just like his father and every other male that was born in his family, a tradition that has stemmed since you guessed it, Franklin Pierce became president. My husband is a great, great nephew of Pierce.

The best. His grandmother actually still owns the presidential China. That's kind of cool. Wow. When someone finds out my husband is a descendant of a president, they get so excited, but my husband and all of his family just roll their eyes and exclaim, oh, he was the worst president. Everyone just remembers Lincoln anyway. It makes me laugh every time that his family doesn't think much of this man any more than

the rest of the world. So just take comfort in knowing that your hate on Pierce and his faults during his time in office aren't past his own family. Man, that's something. I'll do my best to make sure my son makes up for it. Though sad I missed your shows in Denver, please come back. And that is sincerely from Sarah, mother of a Pierce. Thanks, Sarah, mother of a Pierce.

That was a great email. Yeah. And we'll come back to Denver for sure. Sure. Because we sold out two shows there. Denver loves us. Loves us. Can't get enough of us.

The mile high city. Yes. We'll be back. If you want to get in touch with us, why don't you go ahead and mosey on over to stuffishouldknow.com. Check out our social links there. I also have a website called thejoshclargway.com if you want to check that out too. That's right. And you can always send me, Jerry, and Chuck an email all at once at StuffPodcast at howstuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

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