Agnes Roberge making plaster casts of plastic surgery patients, Christie Street Hospital, Toronto, 1944

Agnes Roberge was born in British Columbia to Québécois parents. She studied sculpture at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal before beginning her career as a medical photographer at Vancouver General Hospital. There, she was introduced to the use of rubber facial prostheses, made possible by the recent development of a latex that remained soft and pliable after moulding and cooling. Seeking to deepen her expertise, Roberge travelled to Baltimore to pursue further study in the 1940s. She became one of a handful of prosthetics artists in Canada, working at the Christie Street Military Hospital in Toronto before retiring to Mexico.