A lady that goes to our church recently had plastic surgery of some sort — I’m not sure what she had done, or why. But, as you might imagine, it generated a lot of talk and quickly divided people into two camps — those for it and those against it.
I really have no opinion and never thought much about it other than hearing about various celebrities, that had “work done.”
Anyhow, I became a little curious and decided to google how many people have some kind of plastic surgery every year. Well, google turned up about a million articles about plastic surgery, but one short page caught my eye. It talked a little bit about the history of the procedure.
Physical appearance was very important to the ancient Egyptians — they were one of the first civilizations to use makeup. If an Egyptian suffered an injury that no amount of makeup could conceal, reconstructive surgery was an option — provided that the person had a high enough social ranking. Records dating to 1600 B.C. detail procedures for treating a broken nose by packing the nasal cavity with foreign material and allowing it to heal — it seems like these were, essentially, primitive nose jobs. Then about 1,000 years later in India, a surgeon named Sushruta developed a relatively sophisticated form of plastic surgery for the nose that eventually spread across the Arab world and into Europe.
During the 15th century, Sicilian doctors pioneered a method of suturing and closing wounds that left minimal scarring and disfigurement, and by the 16th century, early methods of skin grafting were being created. It wasn’t until the 19th century that this growing medical field got its common name — “plastic surgery.” That name is attributed to the German surgeon Karl von Gräfe, a pioneer of reconstructive surgery.
Initially, those procedures were typically reserved for people who had suffered horrible damage to their face or body. So what brilliant person came up with the idea of plastic surgery for a purely cosmetic reason? The first silicone breast implants were developed in the 1960s by plastic surgeons Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin. The first person to receive breast implants (not for medical reasons, such as after undergoing a mastectomy, but strictly to improve her appearance) was Timmie Jean Lindsey.
Just like everything else, plastic surgery develops new procedures and surgeries all the time. A procedure called JewelEye implants tiny platinum jewels in the eye to create a glint is supposedly becoming “popular.”
I guess the desire to improve one’s looks is about as old as the human race….
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