Prof Darryl Tong, who is a professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the Otago Dentistry School and consultant maxillofacial surgeon at Dunedin Hospital, said these wartime innovators included the "father of modern plastic surgery", Dunedin-born Dr Harold Gillies.
In a talk yesterday that focused on "100 years on: a brief overview of war surgery of the face and jaws", he said Dr Gillies and his contemporaries, including Prof Percy Pickerill, the English-born first dean of the University of Otago School of Dentistry, "laid down the foundations and key principles of surgery of the face and jaws that are still relevant today".
Some Dunedin people did not realise "how amazing" the Dunedin connection was among early pioneering surgeons.
These surgeons included, during WW2, Prof Archibald McIndoe, and another Otago medical graduate, Dr Rainsford Mowlem.
At the start of WW1, in 1914, the Germans were, in terms of face and jaw surgery, "way ahead" of the British Empire, which effectively had no specialised services ready at that stage.
Realising the deficiency, Dr Gillies set up a face and jaw unit initially at the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot, England, later moving to the Queens Hospital in Sidcup where other maxillofacial units from the Australia, Canada and New Zealand joined him.
The "horrendous injuries" to the face and jaws not only affected the soldiers physically, through problems with eating and speaking, but there were also big psychological effects because the face could be regarded as a person's "outward identity".
"The impact of devastating facial injuries overcame some soldiers, who became recluses, hiding from society and loved ones or, in some instances, took their own lives," Prof Tong said.
Maxillofacial surgery was a "unique blend" of surgery and dentistry, and its early development reflected the "brilliance and innovation" of early surgeons, he said.
Prof Tong is a colonel in the Royal New Zealand Army Medical corps, and served in Afghanistan in 2009, in the Nato Field Hospital in Kandahar.
