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's nose, lip, or ear. This would, he wrote, provide patients with ‘the greatest benefits of all: a tranquil mind and a pleasing appearance’. 1 Copies spread throughout Europe, and the name ‘Taliacotius’ – the Latinate form of Tagliacozzi by which he was best known in Britain – was transmitted widely through medical to popular circles as ‘a famous Chirurgion of Bononia [sic] , who could put on new noses’. 2 Yet modern medical historians hold that Tagliacozzi's influence was short-lived: that all European knowledge and practice of rhinoplasty disappeared after his
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.
(‘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
A perfect storm of stigma, misrepresentation, miscommunication, and even bibliophilia clouded the procedures associated with Gaspare Tagliacozzi for two centuries. They were never wholly obscured from an important, if select, cohort of owners, readers, and their networks and libraries, and significantly influenced the theory behind and then performance of skin-flap rhinoplasties and other grafting procedures. Before Joseph Constantine Carpue and others could revive the practice of skin-flap rhinoplasty, shifts did need to occur. These
Far from disappearing from medical knowledge, rhinoplasty remained a widely known procedure among surgeons and physicians in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. While many surgeons doubted that a new nose could be created from skin grafted from the patient's or another's arm, the majority accepted the possibility that the nose could be reattached, and that this represented an acceptable – even desirable – surgical intervention in the face. Prominent surgeons and physicians across Britain owned, borrowed, and read copies of De curtorum chirurgia , and
There was a substantial economic dimension to early modern rhinoplasty. The loss of the nose was seen to be a highly significant way in which the individual was devalued, as the stigma caused immeasurable damage to his or her social capital. Individuals who restored their bodies through excessive body work, including the reconstruction of the nose, could be seen as attempting to rejuvenate their social status, inviting shame upon both themselves and the enabling surgeons. For those working surgeons who remained interested in rhinoplasty, the beauty
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
This chapter introduces the problem posed by Taliacotian rhinoplasty by examining corporal legibility and the types of bodily modification imagined, available, accepted, or ridiculed in early modern Britain. It explores the fine line between styling and falsifying the body as the limits of accepted body work, and the representation of such techniques in early modern British literature. I argue for a persistent suspicion about the capacity of identity to be masqueraded even at the level of the skin and flesh, enabling the individual to pass for a member of a
). In essence, the distinction referred to the material used. Reconstructive surgeries used human flesh to reshape portions of the face. These could serve primarily aesthetic or physiological purposes. Operations to repair cleft lips, which affected the ability to speak, eat, and drink, involved both. 82 The nose’s function and the morality of restoring a maimed nose were matters of debate among humanist physicians, but these intellectual niceties did not preoccupy surgeons who discussed rhinoplasty in the German vernacular
feminist discourses – as located in the individual. Thus, the identities and psyches of patients have been foregrounded by researchers as they attempt to find out why something like cosmetic surgery or cosmetic surgery tourism even exists. This focus not only risks leaving out key sociocultural aspects but has also actually produced cosmetic surgery subjects. Writing about her own rhinoplasty, Pitts-Taylor (2009: 120) suggested that feminist interpretations of cosmetic surgery that focus on individuals, especially those that situate them in terms of their mental health