Tag: plastic surgery
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Sushruta, the father of rhinoplasty
Matthew TurnerHershey, Pennsylvania, United States From around 1000–800 BC, a golden age of medicine dawned in ancient India, where ayurveda, the “science of life,” flourished.1 At the heart of this revolution was the legendary physician Sushruta, whose writings in the famous Samhita describe surgeries from cataract removal to treatment of bladder stones, diseases including diabetes…
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Nicolò Manucci, physician at the Court of Prince Shah Alam in seventeenth-century India
Stephen MartinThailand A teenage stowaway on a ship from Venice in 1653 had an unusual route into medicine. He was Nicolò Manucci (1638–1720, Fig 1). The earliest image of him gathering medicinal herbs in India is in the style of a Moghul imperial artist, probably done in Aurangabad, judging by the pink and brown color of…
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The Citadel and the Dilemma: Medicine corrupted
Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel Ethical behaviour of doctors is a timeless issue. A recent television investigation in Australia looked at legal but hardly ethical behaviour of doctors performing plastic surgery.1 Two books, a novel and a play written a century ago, remind us that problems with medical ethics are not new under the sun. A.J.…
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Book review: The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “A chirurgien should have…the harte of a lyin…the eyes of a hawke…[and] the hands of a woman.”—John Halle, English surgeon (c. 1529–c. 1568) Dr. Harold Gillies (1882–1960) was born in New Zealand to a family of Scottish origin. He studied medicine at Cambridge and took further training in otorhinolaryngology. When the First…
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Botulism: from pork sausages to Botox
Justinus Kerner in old age, taken a few years before his death. circa 1860. Taken by Friedrich Brandseph. Scanned from Klaus Günzel: Die deutschen Romantiker. Via Wikimedia. Of the various kinds of food poisoning that afflict mankind, botulism is the most dangerous. It has likely occurred for many centuries, as shown by sundry dietary laws…
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The times of Gaspare Tagliacozzi, founder of plastic surgery
In his essay on Giovanni Battista Cortesi, recently reviewed in this Journal, Dr. Paolo Savoia refers to other surgeons who achieved prominence in sixteenth-century Italy. In medicine, as in the arts, progress had been abetted by an influx of Greek scholars from Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. In Western Europe,…
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A plastic surgeon’s weeks in lockdown
Neha ChauhanBangalore, Karnataka, India As I tuned in to the announcement on March 24th, 2020 that India would be completely locked down for next three weeks to flatten the curve of coronavirus spread, my heart skipped a beat and then almost sank. I spent a sleepless night trying to understand my reaction of experiencing a…
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Of honors lost and honor regained: Indian origin of plastic surgery
Neha ChauhanKarnataka, India “A skilful dissembler may disguise in a degree, the expression of mouth, the hat may be slouched over the eyes and the chin may be hidden in the impenetrable thicket of beard but the nose will stand out and make its sign inspite of all precautions. It utterly refuses to be ignored…