were given by nature but taken away by fate. We do this not to please the eye but to support the injured person’s hopes and help his soul.” Tagliacozzi’s work was condemned by his contemporaries, however; they regarded nasal operations as illegal and as crimes against nature. Tagliacozzi was eventually buried in unconsecrated ground.
During the 1600s and 1700s developments in plastic surgery were virtually nonexistent. One important reason was that during this time it was believed that tissues could be borrowed from another person, preferably a slave. Today we know that foreign tissue is invariably rejected unless the immune system is deactivated with medication.
It was not until 1794 that progress resumed. At that time an English magazine published an article about an operation that had been done in the colony of India: a nose had been repaired by cutting loose and rotating down a bit of skin from the forehead. The patient had been anesthetized with a mixture of betel and arrack. The article was read with great interest by a London surgeon named Joseph Carpue. He subsequently performed the same procedure himself, but it took him until 1814 to get up the courage to do so. When he took off the bandages three days later, he is reputed to have said, “My god, there is a nose!” After that, progress picked up speed. Techniques were developed to change the shape of the nose, repair cleft palates etc. Hundreds of articles describing different plastic surgery techniques were published in the late 1800s.
But it was the First World War that forced the really rapid progress that led to modern plastic surgery. When the war broke out there was virtually no experience in handling either the types of injuries or the number of injured that began pouring in. Few surgeons knew how to treat gunshot wounds in the face, for example. This led to the establishment of specialized surgical centers.
One of the pioneers, the Frenchman Morestein, died early in an influenza epidemic, so an English surgeon became the father of modern plastic surgery. He came originally from New Zealand, and his name was Harold Delf Gillies. Gillies developed plastic surgery at Queen Mary’s hospital in Sidcup, England.
Procedures of a more aesthetic nature, especially in nasal surgery, were developed in the period between the wars. In Berlin in the early 1930s, a man named Joseph published textbooks on the subject which established him as a pioneer. In the period between the wars there were few places where this special kind of surgery could be learned, and a few surgeons held a virtual monopoly on the techniques.
During the Second World War, plastic surgery developed from a more or less experimental area to a full-fledged specialty. New needs could be met – complex fractures, burns, frostbite and nerve damage could be treated. This contributed greatly to the almost explosive developments of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Today this period is called the Golden Age of plastic surgery. The public was becoming better informed. Revolutionary new treatments were developed, such as correction of severe congenital deformities of the head, and microsurgery, which made possible the repair of very small bits of tissue such as nerves and blood vessels. Toward the end of this period techniques for aesthetic surgery were also improved. Aesthetic surgery was no longer regarded as some-