With all the current flap regarding Renee Zellweger’s cosmetic surgery I found it curious that on this day (so say several sources), 1814, the first plastic surgery took place. It was a nose job and as an example I’ve provided a “before” and the piece of nose for the “after”. OK, not really. At any rate, the date is curious, not because it didn’t happen on that day, but because there have been numerous instances of previous similar surgeries around the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. The earliest example dates back to Egypt around 3,000 BC and that one was a nose job – rhinoplasty for you purists. There were a few other examples like one that took place around 1450 when a doctor rebuilt a “… male nose for one who lacks it, and the dogs have devoured it.” A flap of skin from behind the guy’s armpit provided the new nose. Plastic surgery, which gets its name from the Greek which translates as “plastike” and basically means “the art of modeling of malleable flesh,” was rarely used until the late 1800’s because there was no anesthetic and the procedures were extremely painful. World War I brought the art to the public’s attention thanks those poor bastards in the trenches that got their faces blown off. I’ve provided an example of a guy receiving such a procedure. Frankly, I’ve studied this comparison photo for a while and I’m hard pressed to say that the “after” (R) is much of an improvement over the “before”.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 06:20:06 +0000