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2023 Warren A. Sawyer Lecture to Feature Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris

by Tabitha Samuel on 2023-10-24T12:00:00-04:00 | 0 Comments

 

2022 Sawyer Lecture Flyer

Join us Monday, November 6, 2023, for the 2023 Warren A. Sawyer Lecture and reception. Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, New York Times Bestselling Author, will be the featured lecturer. In this lecture, she will talk about her newest book, The Facemaker, and Harold Gillies' dedication to facial reconstruction. The event will take place in person and virtually on Zoom.

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. The war caused carnage on an industrial scale, and the nature of trench warfare meant that thousands sustained facial injuries. In The Facemaker, award-winning historian Lindsey Fitzharris tells the true story of the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to restoring the faces of a brutalized generation.

Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, established one of the world’s first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of facial differences, Gillies restored not just faces, but identities and spirits.

The Facemaker places Gillies’s ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine and art can merge, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris is a New York Times Bestselling Author with a Ph.D. in the History of Science and Medicine from the University of Oxford. Her debut book, The Butchering Art, won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Literary Science and has been translated into twenty languages. Her latest book, The Facemaker, debuted at #4 on the L.A. Times Bestseller List, and was recently long listed for the Kirkus Book Prize.

Lindsey writes regularly for a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, The Guardian, The Lancet, and New Scientist. Her television series on the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death of…, explores some of the most mysterious deaths in history. Lindsey is currently working on a children’s book with her husband Adrian Teal, notable artist and caricaturist for the hit TV series, Spitting Image.

The 2023 Sawyer Lecture will take place Monday, November 6, 2023, at 6 PM EST in person and on Zoom. This event is open to the public. Seating is limited and registration is required by Friday, November 3, 2023, at 6 PM to reserve your seat and to receive login information, if attending virtually.

The Waring Library Society sponsors this annual lecture as part of the Waring Library Society Lecture series. The Warren A. Sawyer Lecture is named in memory of Warren Sawyer who served as Director of Libraries at the Medical University of South Carolina from 1968 until his death in November 1989. Mr. Sawyer was born in Bay Shore, New York, and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and earned his MS in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He contributed to local and national functions in roles as diverse as Secretary to the University Faculty and member of the Biomedical Library Review Committee of the National Library of Medicine. Mr. Sawyer was a long-time member of the Waring Library Society of which he served as president.

To learn more information about our programs or the Waring Library Society, visit the Waring Library Society page, email waringhl@musc.edu or call the Waring at 843-792-2288.


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