Lindsey Fitzharris

Lindsey Fitzharris studied the history of science and medicine at the University of Oxford, completing her doctorate in 2009. She later worked as a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral research fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Beyond her books, she has brought medical history to a wider audience through The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice, her research-based blog, and articles for publications including The Guardian, The Lancet and Scientific American.

Her narrative histories examine decisive moments in surgery through the people who endured or drove them. Fitzharris writes with an eye for the operating room’s physical realities, but the blood and damaged bodies are never mere spectacle. Her central concerns are suffering, resistance to new ideas, and the ingenuity required to turn experimental methods into accepted care.

Her debut, The Butchering Art, recounts Joseph Lister’s campaign to establish antiseptic surgery amid the infection-ridden hospitals of the nineteenth century. It won the 2018 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize. The Facemaker follows Harold Gillies and the team of surgeons, artists and nurses who developed new ways to reconstruct the faces of servicemen wounded during the First World War. It was a finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize.

Begin with The Facemaker, the Fitzharris title listed on WebToTell. Its close attention to Gillies’s patients gives the history unusual emotional force, while the improvised operations show reconstructive surgery emerging through a combination of medical skill, artistic judgment and sustained collaboration.