When the First World War was at its height Henry Tonks, Professor of the Slade, found himself serving in the Medical Corps of the British Army. Although qualified as a surgeon, he was an artist by profession, painting landscapes and portraits in a fluent, accomplished, conservative style that owed much to the example of French Impressionism. His wartime duties also required him to paint portraits, albeit of an unusual kind. As part of his work in the “facial reconstruction” unit, he depicted the terrible wounds suffered by young soldiers at the front. He painted men without ears and noses, or with tongues lolling from holes where their jaws had once been. He painted faces burned so badly they had become little more than two eyes staring from an amorphous mess of livid, crimson flesh.

The resulting pictures are among the most moving visual documents of the Great War, full of pathos yet also touched by a deep irony. They are the work of an artist who had little time for the avant-garde movements of his day, an artist who detested the likes of Picasso but who found himself, nonetheless, forced by a terrible reality to paint pictures resembling nightmarish modernist visions – faces melted by fire into screaming Expressionist masks, faces rearranged by shrapnel and shot into living Cubist collages. Each image is labelled with dispassionate rigour – Disfigured Soldier Number 18 – although the artist’s fellow-feeling for his traumatised subjects is painfully apparent. There was no surgical requirement to capture their expressions, but he did so nonetheless. The look in the young men’s eyes is desolate, desperate, trapped.

 

This is not, strictly speaking, an art exhibition, although art, design and film are often part of it – sometimes in very surprising ways. For example, Florence Nightingale used the latest tools of nineteenth-century design, such as statistical pie-charts and diagrams – and did so, with great effectiveness, to persuade those in authority above her to see and understand the difference between a military hospital that took hygiene seriously, and one that did not. And while Henry Tonks was using the tools of his art to record the wounded faces of injured troops, sculptors would be employed in an attempt to remedy such terrible damage. The show includes a disturbing but utterly transfixing early black and white film in which a man with literally almost no face is fitted out with a mask handmade in the studio of a now forgotten early twentieth century sculptor. Another object lesson in human ingenuity under conditions of crisis is the small but infinitely poignant design for a cigarette rolling device intended for use by men with no hands. In the same section of the show, artists and engineers are found forming an unusual alliance to pioneer the design of early prosthetic limbs. One of the most memorable displays in the show brings a selection of experimental models together – replacement arms, legs and hands for the huge proportion of young men who had to live with such disabilities in the Twenties and Thirties.

Thematic exhibitions of this kind are notoriously hard to pull off, but “War and Medicine” is a shining exception to the rule. There is no appearance of clutter, no sense of the well-meaning municipal library display that tends to bedevil most shows that take on this type of large and difficult subject matter. The cavernous spaces of the Wellcome Collection’s ground floor galleries have been unified by a quite brilliant piece of exhibition design. Display cases and wall texts are integrated within a running motif of jagged forms, lightly evoking the machinery and the wreckage of war, while stopping just the right side of theatre. The German designer responsible. Alex Wieher, was perhaps influenced by the jaggedly violent aesthetic of artists working in the aftermath of World War I, such as George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix (work by all three artists is included in the show). Above all it is the choice of exhibits that has been so enthrallingly well handled. Around every corner there is something that fascinates and disturbs, whether it is a letter from a hapless soldier in the Crimean War lamenting the government’s “typical” stupidity in sending out packets of coffee unground – he got around the problem by grinding it with his rifle butt in a shell case – or a long suppressed American military documentary about the psychological trauma suffered by soldiers during the Second World War.

There are moments of black comedy, such as a public information film designed to teach blitzed Londoners how to treat a whole range of flesh wounds – each one done using make-up and special effects of exactly the kind that would later become the hallmark of Hammer Horror movies. There are also moments of utter blackness, such as the section that treats the subject of medical expertise being applied not to undo the damage of war, but to make weapons all the more potent in maiming and killing. Woven into the already rich fabric of the show, there are also a number of contemporary works of art, including an all-enveloping video installation by David Cotterell that lurchingly transports the viewer into the belly of a modern Hercules flying to the aid of wounded soldiers in Afghanistan. A polemic of sorts can perhaps be inferred from the whole exhibition, since its core argument is plainly – by implication – that those who fight a nation’s battles pay a terrible cost and deserve the best and most sensitive care. Wounds of war are often unlike the ailments of the civilian population, and as Mark Harrison writes in the book that accompanies this exhibition, “the loss of separate facilities for military patients has led many to ask whether the ‘military covenant’”, whereby the state looks after its wounded servicemen, has disappeared.

Yet perhaps because it awkwardly straddles so many of the different areas of modern journalistic specialisation – politics, history, health, art, design – “War and Medicine” has received surprisingly little attention in the press. That is a pity. Every GCSE and A-Level History student should pay it a visit. In fact anyone with an interest in the past, and its relationship to the present, will find it enthralling. Constantly thought-provoking, this really is one of the outstanding exhibitions of the year.