Medicine: Cleft-Lip Craft

There were no serious casualties one day in mid-1954, so 34-year-old Captain David Ralph Millard Jr., assigned to a 1st Marine Division medical unit in South Korea, had time at day's end to ponder one aspect of his chosen specialty: plastic surgery. Among the Korean youngsters around the base were many with cleft lips. Dr. Millard set a series of photographs of them on an easel, and while studying them he dozed off. He awoke with a start, looked at them from a new direction, and then the inspiration came: what he (and generations of surgeons before him) had failed to...

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