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PROUD FLESH.

Article Excerpt
In 1597, Gaspare Tagliacozzi, a professor of surgery at the University of Bologna, published "De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem," an illustrated guide that documented for the first time a technique for performing a rhinoplasty, or nose job. And what a nose job it was. In one of a series of woodcuts, Tagliacozzi depicts a noseless Renaissance gentleman, his ruff untied and his jerkin unlaced, sitting with left arm outstretched, a meaty flap hanging from his biceps; in the next, an elaborate harness straps his arm up and back, so that his face is buried in his upper arm and his hand is extended over his head, as if he were sniffing his armpit and scratching his occipital bone at the same time. The harness would stay on for twenty days, until old arm tissue became new nose tissue--or tissue that might at a distance pass for a nose, which was the best that Tagliacozzi's patients could expect, the likelier prospect being infection, excruciating pain, and death.

Tagliacozzi's woodcuts are reproduced in "Aesthetic Surgery," a lavishly illustrated volume about plastic surgery, edited by Angelika Taschen, that was published in 2005. (The book may be too lavishly illustrated for some tastes: along with a number of fascinating diagrams from medical textbooks of the past four centuries--the before-and-after shots of their time--there are many gruesome photographs of contemporary surgeries in progress, including one of a brow-lift, in which a hairy forehead has been cut away from the skull and folded down over the anesthetized patient's eyes. It looks like something dreamed up by Bunuel.) Tagliacozzi also makes an appearance in "Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery" (Doubleday; $24.95), the hybrid...