Nose jobs and other forms of plastic surgery are nothing new – people have been performing them for thousands of years.
With no anaesthesia except opium, and using pieces of straw for nostrils, Indian medicine men were carrying out nose jobs in ancient times. The demand came mostly from men mutilated by war or punishment.
Walking down the dusty streets of 18th-century Mysore, India, a British officer was startled by a local merchant with a scarred forehead and misshapen nose. Intrigued, he asked about the man’s appearance, and learned that he had been found guilty of adultery and had had his nose cut off as punishment. A vaidya – a Hindu holy man – had fashioned him a replacement using the man’s own skin. This chance meeting introduced the notion of plastic surgery to America and Europe.
Reconstructive surgery had been practised in India for more than 2000 years, but it was a medical feat unknown in the West. When an account of a grafting operation was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine of London in October 1794, it attracted much interest.
It has long been accepted that ancient civilisations possessed the ability to carry out basic surgical operations. An ancient Egyptian manuscript known as the ‘Edwin Smith Papyrus’ dating from about 3000 BC contains advice on how to treat fractured noses and jaws, and directions on stitching and cauterising (sealing wounds by burning). Skeletons excavated from a craftsmen’s village near the Valley of the Kings show that when these labourers sustained fractures their bones could be reset and splinted. But medical historians are still surprised by the discovery that plastic surgery involving extensive reconstruction was carried out centuries before the invention of anaesthesia.
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