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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.4 (2000) 848-849



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Book Review

Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery


Sander L. Gilman. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xxii + 396 pp. Ill. $29.95; £17.95.

The medical historian Sander Gilman is well known for his work on the cultural construction of bodies (as pathological, ugly, sexually promiscuous, or "raced"). He has already written several books that touch upon aesthetic surgery and its relevance for understanding identity and difference in late modern society (The Jew's Body, 1991; Picturing Health and Illness, 1995; Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, 1998). In Making the Body Beautiful, his aim is more ambitious: to provide a history of aesthetic surgery in the West that shows how cultural assumptions about bodies and minds are played out in surgical textbooks as well as in literature, art, and films (p. xxi). The result is a wide-ranging, well-documented, and highly readable exploration of the most popular and--in some ways--problematic medical profession, and the cultural obsessions that inform it.

Although this book covers a lot of well-trodden ground--most of it trodden by Gilman himself--its central thesis remains original. According to Gilman, the popularity of aesthetic surgery is due to recipients' wish to "pass" into a more socially desirable group. In particular, aesthetic surgery can eliminate or disguise markers of racial or ethnic origin, allowing the individual to become invisible. To make his case, he pays special attention to the history of rhinoplasty. Originally developed by John Roe at the turn of the century to alter the pug noses of Irish immigrants in order to help them become "real Americans," the "nose job" became increasingly popular among Jews in Europe and the United States as a means of becoming assimilated or--more dramatically--escaping persecution during the Third Reich in Germany. Gilman is at his best in describing the long and horrific litany of anti-Semitic constructions of the Jewish body as diseased, oversexed, and feminized, and the role played by surgeons in deploying "classical" (i.e., "gentile") ideals of beauty as well as creating techniques that could enable Jews to "disappear." [End Page 848]

Although Gilman's emphasis on nose surgery allows him to make his case that aesthetic surgery is, first and foremost, about the elimination of racial identity, he extends the notion of passing to other kinds of surgery as well. For example, face-lifts enable the middle-aged patient to pass as young; breast augmentations allow a flat-chested woman to become more "feminine"; and an eyebrow lift eliminates the criminal appearance of the individual with a low forehead, allowing him to pass as respectable.

Gilman's attempt to map race and ethnic identity onto the history of aesthetic surgery and to demonstrate its origins in nineteenth-century racial science is timely and convincing. However, his inflation of the notion of "passing" to encompass all forms of such surgery weakens rather than strengthens his argument. He seems overly concerned that aesthetic surgery not be viewed solely from the perspective of gender (p. 31), and he takes feminist critics to task for their simplistic emphasis on the ideologies of femininity and their tendency to employ victim/perpetrator models. While this criticism is not without validity, Gilman overstates his case when he posits race as the primary defining feature of aesthetic surgery. His own analysis of how Jewishness, femininity, and pathology were interconnected in images of deficient noses would seem to indicate that a more intersectional approach is in order--that is, an approach that explores how race/ethnicity, gender, class, and other cultural differences mutually inform constructions of "ugliness."

These criticisms notwithstanding, Making the Body Beautiful is an important contribution to our understanding of the emergence and significance of aesthetic surgery. It is a "must" for anyone concerned with our present cultural obsession with beauty and the makability of the body. And it provides a model for writing medical history that...

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