From Ancient Egypt to Rome: How Did Plastic Surgery Originate?

Today plastic surgery is something we’re all familiar with. Even if we’ve never had any done ourselves, we know of someone who has. We have a good idea of what kind of procedures are available and even some vague knowledge of what exactly is done in those procedures. But of course, it wasn’t always like this.

We often assume plastic surgery is a very recent development and associate it purely with the modern age, but in fact it goes far backs into the annals of history.

Plastic surgery began with the Ancient Egyptians, used for the dead rather than the living. In order to preserve their royal dead, the Ancient Egyptians took measures to make sure they looked as they did when they were living. The mummy of Ramses II had a small bone and seeds inserted into his nose to ensure it would look the same in the afterlife as it had when he was alive.

However, it was the Ancient Indians who practised a form of plastic surgery we might find more recognizable. Ancient Indian Sanskrit texts describe a form of reconstructive surgery to repair noses and ears that were lost as a punishment for crimes or in battle. The “Indian method of Rhinoplasty” involved cutting skin from the forehead or the cheek and using it to reconstruct the nose.

The Ancient Romans also performed a surprising amount of plastic surgery – usually to correct whatever they viewed as flaws (and in the strict, image-conscious Roman society, “flaws” described an awful lot of things). Cornelius Celsa’s De re medicina describes circumcision removal (one of the most popular procedures) and a breast augmentation on an obese man with what we would today term “moobs”.

The Renaissance brought us the man most plastic surgeons consider “the father of modern plastic surgery”, Gasparo Tagliacozzi. Using skin grafts for rhinoplasty, Taglioacozzi was invaluable to people who had lost their noses to an outbreak of syphilis at the time. It was not only embarrassing to have lost your nose to the syphilis outbreak – women particularly were assumed by others to have committed some great sin, to have caused God to rain down such misfortune upon them. Taglioacozzi fought for the misfortunes of such women to be recognized as a medical problem, rather than a moral one.

The term “plastic surgery” itself originated in1818, when Karl Ferdinand used it in his text Rhinoplastik. There was a lot of religious controversy around the entire topic – as of course, many saw plastic surgery as an attempt to interfere with what God had created. Ferdinand, like Taglioacozzi before him, saw plastic surgery as an opportunity to correct medical issues and problems, and used classical terms like “rhinoplasty” (and “plastic surgery” itself, which comes from the Greek word “plastikos”, meaning to mold or shape) in an attempt to garner respect for the field.

However, by World Wars I and II, plastic surgery was becoming vastly more commonplace. War meant that the need to reconstruct faces from injuries was a growing concern. Even once WWII finally ended, plastic surgery had become well known enough that there was a continuing demand for it – but this time from affluent housewives desiring to “improve” themselves. The 60s and 70s cemented plastic surgery as something that was not going away.

And now, in our current day and age, new advancements in the field are being made all the time. Plastic surgery is still very much developing, with so much left for surgeons to strive to achieve. Who knows what will be possible in just ten years from now?