Educational Media Reviews Online

With its mix of beautiful images of landmark books in the field of plastic surgery, photographs, illustrations, and film clips, A Plastic Story does a very fine job of tracing the development of plastic surgery from around 800 B.C. to the present. Also interspersed throughout the film are interviews with individuals in the fields of medicine and history from around the world including renowned plastic surgeons Ivo Pitanguay of Brazil, Ortiz Monasterio of Mexico, and Khoo-Boo Chai of Singapore and Malaysia.

One of the earliest recorded descriptions of rhinoplasty came from ancient India, where skin grafts were used to repair the damage resulting from nose amputations. In the sixteenth century, Andreas Vesalius in his classic works of anatomy did much to provide the knowledge of the human body which many surgeons lacked. During this same period Ambroise Pare, originally a barber-surgeon, in his 1579 book Les Ouevres, describes the specialized sutures he developed for use in his operations. Gaspare Tagliacozzi, considered by some to be one of the early fathers of plastic surgery, restored damaged noses by using skin grafted from the patient’s arm.

In the late 18th and the 19th centuries, surgeons such as Guillaume Dupuytren, Carl Ferdinand Von Graefe, who in 1818 coined the term “plastic” surgery, Eduard Zeis, who introduced the term “plastic surgery” into the medical terminology with the first textbook on this subject in 1838, and Johann Dieffenbach, who was one of the first surgeons to make reconstructive rhinoplasty more tolerable through anesthesia, advanced the specialty of plastic surgery.

In the late 19th and the twentieth centuries, Dr. John Roe of Rochester, New York, was the first to perform an operation to reduce the size of noses. Dr. Jacques Joseph, considered a master of rhinoplasty, performed 43 operations over six years. Two world wars provided the impetus for further advances in reconstructive plastic surgery. During World War I Dr. Harold Gillies, who had studied the facial reconstruction techniques of Dr. Hypolite Morestin in France, worked to repair the devastating deep facial wounds suffered by soldiers. In World War II, Dr. Gillies and others performed skin grafts using the “pedicle tube” method to help badly burned pilots and victims of air raids.

Changes in women’s fashions and the ability of women to speak for themselves played a role in the beginnings of modern aesthetic surgery. In the 1920’s, the “flapper” movement favored flat chests and breast reduction became one of the earliest of the cosmetic surgeries. Dr. Suzanne Noel, an early suffragette and skilled surgeon, performed cosmetic surgery in her apartment. The roaring twenties was “the most creative and dangerous period of plastic surgery.” During this period two famous lawsuits involving plastic surgeries that ended tragically demonstrated the need to better inform patients about the possible risks involved in these procedures. In 1931 The American Society of Plastic Surgeons was established. The film also covered the development of techniques such as breast implants and liposuction.

Highly recommended for academic health sciences libraries, particularly those with history of medicine collections.