My first love was plastic surgery - and I always find it interesting to see the connotation associated with it today. People call women “plastic” as an insult, evoking the image of a Barbie doll, shaped and unnaturally molded to a male-centric ideal.
That is not what plastic surgery (or aesthetic medicine) is, was, or should be.
Plastic comes from the Greek “plastike”(teckhne) the art of modeling or sculpting, meaning return to form and function.
We know how much I love my medical history, and the origin of all cosmetic treatments really stemmed from the devastating facial traumas that were seen after the World Wars.
More articles on Medical History
For more than three hundred years, the most fashionable medicine in Europe was other people. Kings drank tinctures of human skulls, apothecaries sold powdered Egyptian mummy by the ounce, and painters ground the dead into a colour. It was sold as the secret to vitality, youth and health — and it may all have started with a mistranslation.
This is the story of corpse medicine and the counterfeit-mummy trade.