A Normal Face
'I don't know if it is artistry - we just try to make people, children, normal.' Paul Tessier is a remarkable French surgeon who has pioneered novel techniques of facial reconstructive surgery for patients whose faces are tragically deformed, either through birth defects or injury. He has developed unique methods of rebuilding the skull itself with bone grafts, and of operating around the eye sockets, where once surgery was thought too difficult and dangerous to attempt. 'He can give you' as one child's father says, 'a new face.'
This film traces the work of surgeons like Tessier and others who have followed him, as they use their skills to transform not only their patients' appearance, but their whole lives. One such patient is 11-year-old Danny [text removed], whom the cameras follow through the anxious days before, during and after the remarkable operation that is to give him, at last, a normal face.
Narrator Paul Vaughan
Written and produced for WGBHtv Boston by THEODORE BEGOSIAN
Horizon editor GRAHAM MASSEY