Conference: University College London and the National Portrait Gallery 8 and 9 November 2002

Henry Tonks: Art and Surgery; Strang Print Room, University College London; open Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons until March 2003 (tel 020 7679 2540)

Long before Leonardo da Vinci first picked up a brush to paint the male anatomy, the studies of art and medicine were closely intertwined. This conference—a collaboration between the National Portrait Gallery; University College, London; and the University of Westminster—aimed to explore some of the more complex relationships between medicine, conflict, and art.

Pictures from the Tonks exhibition show the poor ruined faces of England

Much of the first day centred on the work of Harold Gillies and Henry Tonks. Gillies was a military surgeon who made great advances in reconstructive surgery through repairing the mutilated faces of wounded soldiers during the first world war. Tonks also trained as a surgeon and was commissioned as a war artist. His early work, sanctioned by the government, commemorated the work of the medical services on the front line. After the war, he joined Gillies at a facial surgery unit. Gillies was continuing his work in early plastic surgery; Tonks dedicated himself to providing archival drawings of patients before and after reconstructive surgery.

Tonkss pastels show, in gory detail, the injuries to soldiers who were literally in the line of fire. In stark contrast to his earlier sanitised images of conflict, the pictures show blank despair in the eyes of patients who have raw tissue where noses, cheeks, and jaws should be. The “after” pictures show the same people, happier, proud even, with recognisable facial features once more, although the residual disfigurement ranges from mild to severe.

The second day of lectures continued the theme of medical imagery in war with a brief interlude provided by Kate Adie, news correspondent. Adie gave a fascinating talk on her experiences of reporting from conflict zones around the world. The day finished with an equally interesting talk by John Keane, who took on the Imperial War Museums unenviable position of official recorder for the Gulf war.

The conference was aimed at art students; one lecturer, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, provided a bluffers guide to surgery as part of his talk. The most convincing evidence, however, were the many groans of dismay that accompanied a display of surgical photos showing the differences between full and split skin grafts—the same sound that resonates through medical schools all over the world as the first lesson in anatomy is endured.

In terms of medical interest, the two day conference was a bit hit and miss. Art has its own language, as indecipherable and obscure as that of medicine, and as an appreciater, but certainly no expert on art, the lectures were sometimes hard going. From a non-academic point of view, however, it frequently threw up interesting nuggets of trivia—for example, Kate Adie read Swedish at the University of Newcastle and the term plastic surgery is derived from the Greek, plastis, to mould. Also any event that pairs the terms saline drip and iconographic without any sense of irony surely deserves respect.