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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.
it can now live there and it will cover the wound. But it requires specialist post-op nursing care to make sure it doesn’t become infected. So, first you need an operating microscope, which you’re not going to take with you, plus it’s complicated, and you need specialist nurses for the post-op period. So, many years ago I worked in Sarajevo, where they had a plastic-surgery centre. Sarajevo was a leading plastic-surgery centre and lots of war wounds needed
(‘On the surgery of mutilations through grafting’, (Venice: 1597)). Tagliacozzi's rhinoplasty procedure lifted a flap of skin from the patient's upper arm to reconstruct the nose, and is now so well known it forms the logo of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, with Tagliacozzi heralded as the ‘father’ of plastic surgery. But histories of plastic surgery maintain that after Tagliacozzi's death his procedure disappeared from medical knowledge for the following two centuries. This is incorrect. It is likely that Tagliacozzi's procedure was never practised in
clearly show how concern for social and moral order had given way to caring for the well-being of the individual hermaphrodite. The conflict between legal purpose and a DS_C07.indd 165 11/15/11 4:44 PM 166 doubting sex humanitarian perspective came to a head in discussions concerning plastic surgery on genitals and secondary sex characteristics, as the third section will show. In all these discussions, the ‘sex of self ’ had, all of a sudden, become something seriously to be taken into account. Also this sex of self became an object of observation, discussion, care
, the son of a satin weaver. 4 He rose to become a highly respected surgeon whose reputation spread throughout Europe and beyond, today appearing frequently on everything from medical history blogs and the television quiz show QI to the insignia of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons. Tagliacozzi studied and then taught at the University of Bologna, where he introduced many of his students to his rhinoplasty method. The university held his plastic surgery work in such high esteem that they erected a statue to him in their anatomy theatre in 1640 – holding
comes In 1687 and 1696, an English translation of book two of De curtorum chirurgia was published in London by ‘a Member of the College of Physicians’. Chirurgorum comes has been surprisingly under-used by historians of plastic surgery and other medical fields, despite the fact that it is now available in a large number of university libraries in the original, and many more through microfilm and Early English Books Online (EEBO). Most library catalogues even include Tagliacozzi as one of the text's authors. The authors of an article published in The Lancet of
Chapter one engages with the modification and legibility of the body, focussing on the face, and introduces the special role of the nose in early modern culture. It examines surgical and prosthetic responses to facial injuries as a test to the limits of body work in early modern Britain. The chapter draws on sociological critiques of passing and capital to examine these anxieties, and their effects on the nose. Popular texts show a distinct concern for individuals’ abilities to pass as members of socially superior groups by disguising their bodies in significant ways. Women bore the brunt of these accusations, as satirists derided them as commercialised bodies, indistinguishable from their beautifying commodities. Fashionable men were mocked by contemporaries for effeminately modifying their bodies in similar ways, but the reconstruction of the nose was instead tied to a mask of healthy masculinity. The chapter therefore examines representations of male body work in contemporary texts, alongside the real-world manipulation of body evidence by men such as Henry Bennet, First Earl of Arlington. This facilitates investigation into the relationship between corporal self-fashioning and masculinity in the early modern period, and its place within transhistorical considerations of masculinity and plastic surgery.
on her unfaithful husband, defies her maker by remaking herself anew, not just psychically but also through plastic surgery. 12 The use of surgery as an instrument of pacification rather than empowerment, demonstrated by the sexual surgery carried out by Isaac Baker Brown, was symptomatic of the war on women waged in the operating theatre. Bogus medical theory and practice underpin this
’s self in relation to her body. To demonstrate this, three main themes were discussed: the question of sex diagnosis and the shift from legal to clinical procedures, the clinical assessment of a sex of self by means of a ‘turn inwards’, and the new autobiographical script available for the life history of a person with a so-called ‘error of sex’. The shift from legal to clinical procedures with regard to sex assignment could be seen most clearly in the discussion of the new civil code in Germany and in the international debate on plastic surgery carried out on
subject positions’.4 In contrast to Hausman, I do think changing technologies at the turn of the twentieth century already enabled new subject positions. Thus, new techniques of plastic surgery introduced around 1900, making hermaphrodite bodies look more univocally male or female were not only the result of a dichotomous gender ideology. They also provoked new ways of thinking about the objective of the medical treatment of hermaphrodites in which their ‘sex of self ’ started to be taken into account. Alice Dreger, among others, has suggested that in the period in