In March 1954 news broke that former Second World War fighter pilot and racing driver Roberta Cowell (1918-2011) had become the first known British transgender woman to undergo gender affirmation surgery, an important part of British LGBTQ+ history. Roberta Cowell, or Betty as she was known to her friends, soon became the ‘most talked of woman in England,’ making headlines across national and regional newspapers. And the way that Roberta used print media to tell her own story is a story in …
Harold Gillies
‘Plastic surgery, born in one war and perfected in another,’ had been practiced before the First World War, but it took this global conflict, and a second one, to develop plastic surgery as we know it today. The Sphere | 20 May 1933 In this special blog, using newspapers taken from The Archive, we will trace the development of plastic surgery, from the work of Harold Gillies in the First World War, to its move into the cosmetic mainstream in the …