History of plastic surgery | Plastic Surgery – What is it?

History of plastic surgery

Plastic surgery, especially aesthetic surgery, has experienced a strong upswing, especially in the last decades, and is nowadays no longer a privilege of super rich and movie stars and thus has become socially acceptable. However, contrary to a widely held assumption, the origins of plastic surgery can be found as early as 1000 BC. Documents document regularly performed nose operations around 1200 BC in India, where a flap of tissue was removed from the forehead and a nose was formed from it.

In the background is the fact that under ancient Indian law criminals had their noses amputated as a sign of branding. In ancient Egyptian mummy finds, cosmetic surgery procedures such as sewn ears have also been discovered. The Greek physician and scholar Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.)

already described procedures for the correction of deformed noses and in the 1st century A.D. the Roman scholar Celsus explained methods for the operation of “harelips” (cleft lip and palate). In the Dark Middle Ages, however, such arts and experiments were completely forgotten, so it was even frowned upon and punishable by law to presume to change the God-given shape of man. Only in the Renaissance (French for rebirth) did sciences such as medicine and surgical techniques blossom again.

One of the most famous works, “De curtorum chirurgica” (the restoration of the nose) by Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1546-1599) describes a further development of Indian rhinoplasty, in which the skin comes from the upper arm through a pedicled distant flap. A frequent area of application at this time is the restoration of tissue defects such as those on the nose or ears caused by syphilis, which was already widespread at that time. Plastic surgery experienced a further upswing in the 19th century, when groundbreaking findings in anatomy and natural science made new procedures possible.

In the German-speaking world, the physician Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach (1795-1847), who worked on surgical techniques for the nose, tendons and transplants, is particularly noteworthy. After the Second World War, which naturally brought a large number of wounded, microsurgery enabled a new era in plastic surgery.It was now possible to join together tiny blood vessels and nerves to suture tissues to new areas of the body by securing the blood supply. This made it possible, for example, to reattach arms and legs or to freely transfer skin to non-closable wounds.