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His present book traces records of cleft lips to figurines almost 2,000 years old and surgical attempts to correct them back to early Christian times. About A.D. 950, according to Millard, a Saxon surgeon wrote in The Leech-Book of Bald: "Pound mastic very small, add the white of an egg and mingle as thou dost vermilion, cut with a knife the false edges of the lip, sew fast with silk, then smear without and within with the salve, ere the silk rot." As recently as 1926, St. Louis Surgeon Vilray Blair was so fond of horsehair for sutures that he kept a white horse near a local hospital to ensure his supply.
Millard graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1944 and soon fell under the spell of the great New Zealand-born plastic surgeon, Sir Harold Gillies, with whom he was co-author of The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery. Millard has been at the University of Miami School of Medicine for the past 20 years. He is so aggressively innovative that some colleagues find him abrasive, but all respect his skill and anyone who can heft Cleft Craft will admire his scholarship. Millard is an outspoken proponent of reconstruction of the breast after mastectomy and at the center of controversies in that field. He also performs purely cosmetic surgery such as nose bobbing, and there is a two-year waiting list for Miami matrons who want face lifts. The doctor refuses to disclose his fees for these. "That's where the money is," he admits. But for many of his cleft patients there is no charge.