Plastic Reconstruction of Face, Red Cross Worker, Paris 1918 (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD) In this Parisian lab, facial parts are being plastered and put on a badly disfigured man (most likley a world war one veteran).
The listing of the three areas—medicine, culture, and beauty—in the subtitle of my Living Book on cosmetic surgery is not coincidental. The practice of cosmetic surgery—a surgical intervention into the body for merely aesthetic and not medical reasons—is a medical discipline, dating back to the times of the Hindu doctor Sushruta, who practiced rhinoplasty c. 500 BCE. The promise on which this medical discipline operates is, however, not only that of ‘health,’ but also that of ‘beauty,’ be it a restorative beauty that seeks to ‘repair’ what has been lost (due to age, accident, or illness)—hence reconstructive surgery—or a beauty that is yet to be born, or ‘carved out,’ with the help of an aesthetic surgeon's scalpel and with reference to the grounding pillars of beauty: symmetry and proportion. In both cases, the desire for such beauty can be defined as a cultural phenomenon: in the sense that it affects the way we humans look, what we want, and the way we define our appearance and correlate it to our inner qualities and characteristics. (more)
Roberta J. Honigman, MSW; Alun C. Jackson, PhD; and Nicki A. Dowling, PhD The PreFACE: A Preoperative Psychosocial Screen for Elective Facial Cosmetic Surgery and Cosmetic Dentistry Patients
The famous come-back video Spiegel by the all-female German Hip Hop group Tic Tac Toe came out in 2005. It deals with female body image disorder, and the resulting desire to change everything about oneself, when looking into the Spiegel (mirror). It is told through the voices of three participants of a group therapy session who come out rapping their self-hatred.
