Kristin Ostheimer, archivist at the National Archives of Plastic Surgery at the Countway Library, oversees a collection that includes manuscripts, textbooks, memorabilia, and historic instruments.

The year was 1915. "Tom," a World War I soldier, crouched in a muddy trench alongside his comrades, battling a largely unseen enemy. Tom, too, was hidden -- all but his face -- from the adversary. This fighter suffered a fate similar to that of so many soldiers in "the war to end all wars": when he was hit, Tom's steel helmet saved his life, but his exposed face was torn open, leaving him not only grievously wounded but hideously mutilated as well.

"Wounds such as this, in which jaws, cheeks, teeth, and eyes were literally blasted off the victims' faces, led to the establishment of plastic and maxillofacial surgery as a specialty in its own right," says Kristen Ostheimer, archivist of the National Archives of Plastic Surgery, which is housed in the Medical School's Countway Library. "Soldiers such as Tom relied on plastic surgeons not only to save their lives, but also to restore their faces and thereby their spirits."

Plastic surgery further evolved during World War II, when burns and lacerations suffered by fighter pilots required extensive skin grafting.

By the mid-1900s, plastic surgery was widely recognized as a medical specialty that could help not only soldiers, but also civilians with congenital deformities, to join the ranks of mainstream society. Among the leaders in his field is Robert M. Goldwyn, a clinical professor of surgery at the Medical School and editor of the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

It was Goldwyn who recognized, in 1972, that an unprecedented opportunity existed to gather plastic surgery-related items such as manuscripts, textbooks, memorabilia, and historic instruments.

"Dr. Goldwyn realized that he had a golden -- and probably a final -- opportunity to garner materials from the World War I doctors and the surgeons they trained. These are, after all, the individuals who helped shape this specialty," says Ostheimer.

Largely through Goldwyn's efforts, hundreds of patient records -- such as those of the World War I veteran Tom -- have been saved in the National Archives of Plastic Surgery for study and reference by today's plastic surgeons and other scholars. Tom's file, for example, includes such details as before-and- after photographs, along with physicians' notes and a heartfelt thank-you letter written by the soldier to his plastic surgeon, recounting his recovery.

The National Archives of Plastic Surgery was formally established in 1972, with the backing of the national organizations in plastic and reconstructive surgery. Since that time, Goldwyn has served as the Archives' curator.

The Archives' founders' aim was to build on a base already in the Countway Library's rare books and journals collections, thus establishing in one location a comprehensive collection of this specialty's printed literature.

Material comes to the Archives from a variety of sources, but a current acquisition connotes a special honor for the collection.

"Right now we're gathering the papers of Dr. Joseph E. Murray," says Ostheimer. Murray received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1990 for the first successful kidney transplant, which he performed in 1954.

"But Dr. Murray's first love was plastic surgery," Osteimer continues. "After he graduated from Harvard in 1943, he worked in skin grafting at the Valley Forge Hospital's plastic surgery unit, which served thousands of military personnel injured in World War II. After the war he returned to Children's and Brigham and Women's Hospitals, where he continued his work with skin grafting and did amazing work in the area of congenital deformities. It is an enormous honor for us that he's giving the Archives his papers."

Not all of the Archives' memorabilia is of such a serious nature as reconstructed faces. Ostheimer points to two transparent canisters, in which reside foam rubber breast implants from the Beverly Hills Surgical Supply. The implants' sizes are marked "special" and "medium," but as Ostheimer explains, "they all shrunk to the size of small sponges over time. Probably in another few years, the materials used for today's breast implants will be considered just as silly as these seem to us today."

Plastic and reconstructive surgeons themselves also provide intriguing anecdotes. "A lot of plastic surgeons are artists," Ostheimer says. "And some are characters, too." She points to a mandible -- the lower half of a jaw -- which sits atop a filing cabinet in the Archives' cramped quarters. Around the mandible is tied a red ribbon in a neat bow. "This mandible was a Christmas gift to the Archives a few years ago from a prominent plastic surgeon. He had dozens of these in his basement, and his wife asked him to get rid of them because they were giving her the creeps. So he sent them out to his colleagues with holiday greeting cards.

"We enjoy our work, even as we recognize the enormous value of this unusually comprehensive collection of materials," Ostheimer notes. "Not all medical specialties have their own national archives, so what we have here is unique."