About face

Medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris talks to NAOMI ARNOLD about her biography of a pioneering Kiwi plastic surgeon during WWI, and the context it gave her own diagnosis of cancer.

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At her home in the UK, writer and medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris has spent the past couple of months suspended in uncertainty after a breast cancer diagnosis in August threw everything into turmoil.

Earlier this year, she released her book The Facemaker, about Kiwi surgeon Harry Gillies' groundbreaking work on World War I soldiers whose faces were so badly damaged that their features sometimes weren't there at all.

Fitzharris spent years reading diaries, archives and medical notes, sourcing permission from families to talk about the men whom Gillies so profoundly affected. Fitzharris, who holds a PhD in the history of science and medicine from the University of Oxford and is the writer and host of the Smithsonian Channel series The Curious Life and Death of..., was fully into the swing of promotion for the book. She had interviews and media appearances lined up for the rest of the year when she found a lump in her breast.

She immediately went to get it checked out. It wasn't cancer - but doctors found a lump next to it that was.

It is, at least, early stage. Fitzharris says she was extremely lucky she'd pushed for a mammogram - she says it wasn't necessarily certain that she would have got one otherwise, and the lump would have grown silently undetected until it became too big to ignore.

"I am shocked, frightened, elated, confused, grateful - basically, all the feelings," she says. "I keep asking myself, 'Why me?" But then again, 'Why not me?""

FACES REPAIRING The Facemaker is published in New Zealand on November 1, and is an engrossing, pacey and exhaustively researched read about Sir Harold Gillies, the pioneering Kiwi plastic surgeon who spent a significant part of his career repairing faces blown apart.