China expands scope of its plastic surgery

Press, 26 July 1984, Page 33

China expands scope of its plastic surgery

By

RICK GLADSTONE

of the Associated Press Peking China’s only plastic surgery hospital once concentrated on patching up maimed faces and limbs, but now its surgeons also fix the shape of an eye, the size of a nose or ear, or the facial wrinkles for patients not satisfied with nature’s work. “We do not encourage this, but the people want it, so we are not opposed,” said Dr Song Ruyao, director of the Plastic Surgery Hospital and president of the Chinese Plastic Surgery Society. The ruling Communist Party once banned all plastic surgery as a vestige of bourgeois decadence and Western workshop, and closed the hospital during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. But these puritan standards have been relaxed and now thousands of people want cosmetic surgery from nose jobs to facelifts. The 300-bed, 13-operating room facility is China’s only facility devoted to reconstructive surgery, and Dr Song said it performed more than 2000 operations last year. The hospital usually has more than 200 longterm patients, with problems ranging from thirddegree burns to severed limbs. The average stay was about two months. The hospital still concentrated on major reconstructive surgery such as the transplanting of bones, flesh and skin to repair traumatic injuries. But demand for

cosmetic surgery was now so high that the hospital had a walk-in clinic where simple surgery could be doing after payment of a 10 fen (sc) registration fee. The most popular surgery was for “bobbed” eyelids — converting the characteristic Chinese single eyelid without a fold to a double “folded” lid, he said. It took 30 minutes and cost 20 yuan ($l6). “Many Chinese think the single eyelid is not beautiful,” he said. For a payment of 30 yuan (?24), doctors take cartilage from a rib to enlarge the characteristically small Chinese nose, he said, another popular request. “Most of our patients are young ladies,” he said. “We get very few boys, they seem to be embarrassed.” Foreigners may come, he said, but must pay “four to 10 times” as much as ordinary Chinese. “It depends on their financial situation.” In one of the few cases involving foreigners, Dr Song said a Russian woman who lost most of an eyelid in a stove fire sought help after Soviet doctors said they could do nothing. “We fashioned a new eyelid for her,” he said. “She was so happy she said ‘my prayers have been answered’.” Dr Song said he was not jealous of some of his counterparts in the West who could make millions of dollars performing artful cosmetic surgery. His own salary is 330 yuan (5273) a month. “They are the most skilled surgeons in the

world,” said Dr Song, who learned many of his skills while studying medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the 19405. “But my personal view is that they are wasting their talent.” He said plastic surgery in China developed as a direct result of the 1937-45 war against Japan, in which bombing and shelling disfigured half a million soldiers and civilians. As Dr Song showed a few visitors round the hospital complex in western Peking, most patients darted into rooms, embarrassed, but some were happy to display the hospital’s handiwork. Wang Gang, a 19-year-old peasant from western China’s Qinghai province, recently had surgery to disguise his deformed right ear, a common congenital defect. Removing some bandages, he showed the new ear doctors had fashioned using flesh transplanted from his chest. Before the surgery, he said, “I used to hold my arm over my ear.” The total cost, including his one-month stay in the hospital, was 200 yuan ($166). Han Naixia, a 24-year-old machinist from Tangshan, mangled her right hand in an industrial accident, losing the thumb and most of the index finger. Doctors gave her a new thumb by transplanting the second toe on her left foot. Reconstructive surgery in China has historical roots, according to written records. During the Chin dynasty (265-420 A.D.), a famous premier named Wei

Yungzhi paid a doctor five bags of rice to cure his cleft lip. “It may be treated by incision and suture, but you must eat porridge for 100 days and refrain from speaking or laughing,” the doctor purportedly told him. Wei replied, “To keep my mouth shut for half of my life, there is still another half left. What of a hundred days?”