Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery, and: Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (review)

Sander L. Gilman. Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1998. xii + 179 pp. Clothbound, $21.95.

Sander L. Gilman. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999. xvii + 396 pp. Clothbound, $29.95.

Aesthetic surgery is a more recent and less familiar term than cosmetic surgery, though it has been in official use for nearly half a century. The first congress of the International Confederation of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgery convened in 1955, and the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery was founded in 1967 (the older and more influential American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery was founded in 1931). The term aesthetic continues to gain popularity, as advancing technologies allow the claim that beauty-enhancement procedures are no longer merely cosmetic but actually reshape the body into a new and permanent artistic object. Procedures such as Three Dimensional Liposculpture, Permanent Lip Enhancement, and Feathertouch Skin Resurfacing emphasize this aesthetic dimension and join procedures that include abdominoplasty (tummy tuck), blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery), brachioplasty (upper-arm lift), breast augmentation, breast lift, buttock and calf implants, buttock lift, chemical peel, collagen injections, dermabrasion, face and forehead lifts, fat injections, gynecomastia (male breast reduction), laser skin resurfacing, liposuction, malar (cheek) augmentation, male-pattern baldness reduction, mentoplasty (chin reconstruction), otoplasty (ear surgery), penile and pectoral implants, rhinoplasty (nose job), and thigh lift.

Sander Gilman's focus on aesthetic surgery results in part from his awareness that all attempts to alter body appearance are tied to cultural and racial conceptions of beauty. Further, he recognizes that the medical profession attempts to dissociate cosmetic surgery from a pejorative identification with the "beauty industry" by maintaining "the idea of the 'beautiful' without using the terms beauty or cosmetic" (Making the Body Beautiful, 14). Interested in how conceptions of beauty from antiquity forward have influenced our desires to "remake the self," and how those desires have been addressed by medicine, Gilman offers aesthetic surgery as a comprehensive term for naming a range of procedures variously called plastic, reconstructive, or cosmetic.

In Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, Gilman proposes that clinical definitions of unhappiness with the body developed out of theories of race that held Jews to be immutably corrupt in both appearance and character. Some theories argued that even the pronunciation of Yiddish was tied to the way in which the speaker's nose was formed. Gilman cites nineteenth-century physician Bernhard Blechmann, who said that the Jew's "'muscles, which are used for speaking and laughing are used inherently differently from those of Christians and that this use can be traced...to the great difference in their nose and chin'" (p. 74). The Jewish nose is thus a central focus of racial theory. Gilman concludes that "the 'unhappy' psyche marked by the ugly nose that evokes disease is moved into the world of race and politics" (p. 76). A theme emerges in racial theory that Gilman recalls as a motive and justification for the aesthetic surgery that continues to this day: inner virtue, or lack of it, is associated with outward physical features.

This connection is facilitated by Ernst Kretschmer, who posited three body types and associated each with a particular character. These conjunctions were taken up by Ludwig Stern-Piper (much to Kretschmer's chagrin) to correspond to basic racial types. Moses Julius Gutmann also tried to make Kretschmer's constitutional types correspond to specific mental illnesses: "The so-called predominance among Jews...of the asthenic body type of a long, lanky body suggested to him [Gutmann] that they would be particularly subject to schizophrenia, but in his own [End Page 285...