PLASTIC SURGERY

Greymouth Evening Star, 22 July 1936, Page 13

PLASTIC SURGERY

SCULPTURE OF HUMAN FLESH Aesthetic surgery is the youngest of the medical arts, writes A. P. Lus-combe-Whyte, in the “News-Chronicle.” London. While doctors have not yet succeeded in conquering the common cold, that new. art, the sculpture of the human flesh, has reached a. degree of extraordinary perfection. There are at the present moment 12 famous aesthetic surgeons in England and 50 in America. They have many pupils, and in 10 years, plastic surgery will be universally practised. It is not going too far to say that in 15 years it will probably be the most advanced of all branches of medical science. Already it is being used to perform absolute miracles. Some time ago, in New York, I saw a man leaving hospital. He seemed to me quite normal. Then they showed me a photograph which made me shudder with horror: it was the same man, but disfigured to such a degree that one could not distinguish his features. “Six months ago,” they told me, “be was injured in an automobile accident. They had to perform 25 grafting operations before he could become a normal man again. A few years ago he would have been condemned to live hidden from human eyes.”

His jaw was broken in 12 places. They replaced it with pieces of bone shaped to form a normal jaw and afterwards covered it with flesh and skin. After a time this grew into an indissoluble whole.

The nose, of which there remained only a fragment, was removed and a piece of cartilage from the leg was used to form a new nose. A piece of flesh, taken from the chest, served to replace a cheek, and skin- from the thighs provided eyelids and nostrils. A small piece of the scalp served to make eyebrows. Fortunately the eyes were intact, as the doctors would not have been able to replace them. After this treatment the man’s friends probably could not recognise him. But he was not repulsive looking —far from it.

Recently a workman in a chemical factory was terribly burned in the face by acid. The surgeon decided to take from the man’s chest the flesh and skin necessary for an operation. He gave him a local anaesthetic and an injection of adrenalin in order that he should not bleed too much, then anointed the face with a liquid which formed a mask. The mask was then placed on the man’s chest. A piece of skin the same size was cut out and sewn on the face. At the end of some weeks the little blood vessels of the transplanted skin amalgamated with the other blood vessels. And now one could never guess that this man had had his face burned.

As to operations on the nose, they take place by the million. If the nasal bone is destroyed it is replaced with cartilage. This cartilage is moulded to the shape desired and soon amalgamates with the rest of the face. Nothing is easier than to remodel an existing nose. This operation takes only about an hour and is performed under a local anaesthetic. No scar remains io be seen, as the surgeon operates inside lhe nostrils. They saj’ that a new nose always produces an excellent psychological effect on a pat ient.

An experiment was recently made of grafting a nerve on to a paralysed face. A little piece of nerve was taken from the leg to replace the one which no longer controlled the muscles of the face. It took root, and at the end of six months docilely carried out all the orders of the brain.

So vast are the possibilities, one might say that the future belongs to plastic surgery.