Spiritualizing Prostheses: Anna Coleman Ladd’s Portrait Masks for Mutilated Soldiers of World War I

In November 1918—the very month when the Allied and Central Powers brought the bloody World War I to a close with a lasting ceasefire—a set of prophetic articles appeared in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The main thrust of these articles was to describe what awaited wounded doughboys once they were discharged from military service. One such essay, “The Supremacy of the Spirit,” written by Red Cross Chief of Public Education Howard R. Heydon, opens with a rather provocative proclamation: “The problem of the physically handicapped is one of the spirit.”¹ The wounded veterans’ rehabilitation, he then asserts, “may often take months to overcome all the morbid apprehensions, but once the patients begin to take an active interest in their daily improvement it is only a matter of time before their fighting spirit will again show itself” (Heydon, “The Supremacy of the Spirit,” 53). What is clear from these and other remarks is that the road to recovery from the effects of mechanized warfare was not solely a matter of physiological or biological processes; a patient’s persevering “spirit” was the intangible element needed to secure a successful and durable rehabilitation.

The attention to spirit was found with equal poignancy in the prosthetic devices developed in the wake of the war’s gruesome record of dismemberment and disfigurement. During and after the war, physicians in all the major belligerent nations were seeking ways to better integrate the prosthetic device and the human body to which it was attached. One such figure, the German psychiatrist David Katz, was so concerned with the number of amputees arriving back from the war—estimates put the number at around 67,000 in Germany alone—that he promoted among his colleagues a vitalist approach in which veterans were encouraged to regard their artificial limbs as possessing a spiritual presence.² Katz saw this new perspective as “giving the prosthesis a soul” so that amputees and those closest to them could feel a more personal, perhaps even emotional, connection with the devices that would prove instrumental in navigating the tangible and intangible aspects of postwar life.³

Spiritualizing prostheses was not solely the concern of German rehabilitative efforts, however. Starting in 1917, the classically trained American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd worked for the American Red Cross in Paris crafting prosthetic masks for facially mutilated soldiers. World War I was responsible for an estimated 20,000 facial injuries.⁴ Looming trench walls could become so psychologically oppressive that soldiers frequently looked out over the parapets in order to break the visual monotony of dirt, duckboards, and sandbags. Fred Albee, an American surgeon stationed in France during the war, once lamented, “They seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of bullets.”⁵ Exploding shell fragments proved equally devastating. Not surprisingly, then, medical science responded to the need to treat the many facial wounds the war produced. In fact, plastic surgery itself was pioneered during the war by Hippolyte Morestin and Harold Delf Gillies, who both applied skin grafting techniques to open facial wounds. But when plastic surgery reached the limit of what it could restore to a maimed soldier, the military relied on sculptors and other artists to devise new and ingenious forms of facial prostheses.

This article demonstrates that Ladd herself operated on the premise that prosthetic development possessed a spiritual dimension. As Sander Gilman explains, constant across historical eras has been “the idea that the external body (with whatever qualities are ascribed to it) reflects the values of the soul,” and that a missing or maimed face “could only be understood as a loss of humanity.”⁶ These rough equivalencies between the face and the soul became all the more threatened, adds Suzannah Biernoff, in the age of trench warfare: “For those whose faces were mutilated on the battlefields of the Great War, ‘passing’ as normal was not an option.”⁷ Understanding these difficulties, Ladd was forced to take a different approach to...