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3 On moral nose Jonathan Glover John Harris on olfactory moral philosophy In several of his writings, including his On Cloning, John Harris argues against basing policies on what George Orwell called ‘moral nose’. He says that Orwell used this phrase ‘as if one could simply sniff a situation and detect wickedness’.1 He gives examples of this approach in debate on bioethical issues. One is Mary Warnock’s claim that the existence of morality requires ‘some barriers which should not be passed’ and her thought that often these barriers are marked by ‘a sense of
This book explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain’s experiences with and responses to the surgical reconstruction of the nose, and the concerns and possibilities raised by the idea of ‘nose transplants’ in this period. Challenging histories of plastic surgery that posit a complete disappearance of Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s reconstructive operation after his death in 1599, the book traces the actual extent of this knowledge within the medical community in order to uncover why such a procedure was anathema to early modern British culture. Medical knowledge of Tagliacozzi’s autograft rhinoplasty was overtaken by a spurious story, widely related in contemporary literature, that the nose would be constructed from flesh purchased from a social inferior, and would die with the vendor. The volume therefore explores this narrative in detail for its role in the procedure’s stigmatisation, its engagement with the doctrine of medical sympathy, and its attempt to commoditise living human flesh. Utilising medical research and book histories alongside literary criticism, the project historicises key modern questions about the commodification and limits of the human body, the impact of popular culture on medical practice, and the ethical connotations of bodily modification as response to stigma.
throughout Europe by a variety of media outlets. Perhaps most prominently, the controversial but widely followed columnist Katie Hopkins went to Sicily in April 2017 to investigate the story for the Daily Mail , alleging: Right under the noses of the Italian authorities and the EU border agency, Frontex, a charitable ‘ferry service’ has been launched, with shiny new boats and sympathetic staff allegedly colluding with the
two novels from the mid eighteenth century that took Tagliacozzi's twin reputation and the reconstruction of the nose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in opposite directions. Each novel was critical of the stigma attached to the damaged nose and nasal surgery. In their own ways the novels reflect the changes in public and medical awareness around rhinoplasty, while providing touchpoints for knowledge of Tagliacozzi (and of Butler) in this transitional period. They are also two of the most famous nose books in the English language. The first, Henry
socially superior group (the healthy, the virtuous) by altering their body in significant ways. To this end, I first discuss the many and varied associations made around the nose in order to introduce why surgical interventions in this part carried significant cultural weight. I then discuss surgical interventions in the face, including the provision of prosthetic noses, to demonstrate the range of accepted surgical responses to facial and specifically nasal disfigurement. The most widespread satirical treatments of this theme focus on female bodies. Women, and
False noses of the type described by Alderman Fumble and worn by Tycho Brahe were probably the only real recourse of the noseless in seventeenth-century Britain. But it did not have to be this way, since the medical technique for using skin flaps to build a passable nose was available to surgeons. In De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem , first published in Venice in 1597, Bolognese surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1545–1599) explained in lavishly illustrated detail how a skin flap from the arm could be used to reconstruct a patient
Rhinoplasty proved a rich topos for satirical and allegorical writings, further complicating its surgical status and bringing strange twists to British understandings of the procedure. Though Tagliacozzi had specifically prescribed that the skin used to reconstruct the nose should be sourced from the patient's own arm, popular and many medical understandings of the technique presumed that the graft would be transplanted from the body of another person. These accounts also dug deeper into the other body, requiring ‘flesh’, rather than just skin. This version
The nose is the most prominent part of the most prominent part of the body. Concern over the violated or deformed nose and its impact on the life of the individual was shared by surgeons and the wider community in early modern Britain, and should perhaps have led to axiomatic support for medical interventions that could restore the injured or even missing nose to its expected form and function. Such a procedure was meticulously detailed by the Bolognese surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1545–1599) in De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem
necessary component within art’s work. That necessity arises precisely because there cannot be any real separation of the work from the activity of criticism – the activity that identifies the work, thereby allowing the work to become a site of contestation. From truth to policy – the name of criticism The obvious counter to the argument that policy depends on a decision concerning the truth of art is that such a position overstates the needs of policy makers and confuses philosophical argumentation with the ‘hard-nosed’ practice of decision making. The are many ways of
. The dialectic of ostentation and dissimulation Becoming imperceptible in King Lear paradoxically entails showing up in the riskiest places, right before one’s banisher’s nose, for instance, or publicly undressing to exhibit a nearly naked body that can be scrutinised like a map. It is as if imposing one’s ostentatious persona (both physically and verbally) were the best way to hide one’s genuine