2. The first recorded “nose job” is found in ancient Indian Sanskrit texts (600 B.C.).^c Physicians would reconstruct noses by cutting skin from either the cheek or forehead, twisting the skin side out over a leaf of the appropriate size, and sewing the skin into place. Two polished wooden tubes would be inserted into the nostrils to keep the air passage open during healing.

3. By the first century B.C., Romans were practicing various forms of plastic surgery to repair noses, eyes, lips, and teeth. Roman physician Cornelius Celsus (c. 25 B.C.-A.D. 50) also describes procedures such as circumcision reversal and even breast reduction in men.

4. A popular procedure in ancient Rome was scar removal, particularly scars on the back which were marks of shame because they suggested a man had turned his back in battle—or worse, he had been whipped like a slave. Foreigners would also have plastic surgery to fit better into Roman society.

5. During the Middle Ages, plastic surgery was typically deemed pagan and sinful because the spilling of blood by a surgeon and the power the surgeon had over the body were akin to magic.

6. When plastic surgery became popular during the Renaissance, surgeons took skin grafts from various donors, such as a neighbor’s pig, but were confused when the new nose would shrivel up and fall off. They concluded the flesh was “sympathetic,” meaning that the graft died when its original owner died.

7. Many plastic surgeries in the early Renaissance were performed in barber shops.

8. Italian Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1546-1599) is widely considered the “father of modern plastic surgery.” His text book De curtorum chirugiau noted the need for plastic surgery due to duels and street fights, as well as a pervasive outbreak of syphilis which destroyed the nose. His “virtual” nose, however, could fall off if the user blew too hard, and young women with reconstructed noses were hardly objects of desire.

9. Tagliacozzi was an atypical plastic surgeon during the Renaissance because he did not view illness, such as the syphilitic nose, as divine punishment. Instead he used the vocabulary of humanists such as Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) to justify his surgical innovations as autonomous self-remaking. Tagliacozzi’s work disappeared mainly as a result of the Counterreformation.

10. In 1794, British surgeons witnessed an Indian brick layer repair the nose of a British cattle driver who had his nose and hand cut off while a prisoner of the sultan. British surgeons imported the procedure back to northern Europe where interest rapidly grew.

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