Jason Bate will be talking about what happened in the facial wards, and the aftercare of disfigured veterans once they were discharged from the Army, together with the long-term impact on individuals, and the sense of burden felt by families and local communities as the veterans reintegrated back into society, challenging perceptions of the personal traumas of facially injured ex-servicemen (the paper on which his talk draws is titled 'War Pensions, the Monotony of the Facial Wards, and the Rehabilitation of Disfigured Ex-servicemen, 1916-1925').
A historian of photography, with particular interest in Edwardian histories of medicine, the First World War, visual culture and medical humanities, Dr Jason Bate is a Research Fellow at Birkbeck, the University of London, in the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre. He is currently working on a book length project which examines amateur photographic societies within metropolitan teaching hospitals, 1870-1914. He has recently published a book exploring the ethical dilemmas of bringing medical and family photographic archives together, Photography in the Great War: The Ethics of Emerging Medical Collections from the Great War (2022).
