Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: plastic surgery

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • Book review: The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Facsimile of a wax teaching model made by Sergeant Thomas H. Kelsey for the New Zealand Medical Corps facial and jaw injury unit, c. 1917. British National Army Museum Copyright, released under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. “A chirurgien should have…the harte of a lyin…the eyes of a hawke…[and] the hands…

  • Orion H. Stuteville: A surgeon’s surgeon

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United StatesBangalore JayaramMysuru, Karnataka, India The Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois fostered many notable American surgeons. It was also the birthplace of major medical and surgical advances. Dr. Orion Harry Stuteville (February 15, 1902 – May 26, 1994), or “Steudy”, was one such surgical giant. He had a unique life and…

  • 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…

  • Ethics, feminism, and cosmetic surgery

    Unaiza WaheedLondon In Reshaping the Female Body, Kathy Davis expresses surprise when a feminist friend announces she is considering breast augmentation surgery: “[She] was very critical of the sufferings women have to endure because their bodies do not meet the normative requirements of feminine beauty,” yet she still felt pressure to seek cosmetic surgery for…

  • The times of Gaspare Tagliacozzi, founder of plastic surgery

    Portrait of Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1545-1599). 16th century. Collection Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, Bologna. Via Wikimedia. 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…

  • A plastic surgeon’s weeks in lockdown

    Neha Chauhan Bangalore, 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…

  • Of honors lost and honor regained: Indian origin of plastic surgery

    Neha Chauhan Karnataka, India   Figure 1: A singular operation. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) “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…