The Plastic Surgeon Today and Then

The business of plastic surgery did not evolve to correct the small imperfections and blemishes that people have been born with since the beginning of time. Plastics was actually one of the bounties of war, since many injured soldiers would return from war maimed and disfigured with none of the medical advances in place that we take for granted today to give them any type of quality of life. Mirrors were banned in these wards so the soldiers couldn't see what they looked like and most left to return to as much of a normal life as they could in a world that was not mirror free.

Today's modern plastic surgeon has a New Zealand otolaryngologist named Harold Gillies to thank for creating many of the techniques still used in modern cosmetic surgery. Gillies came up with the techniques to treat soldiers with disfiguring facial injuries in world war one. He was able to expand his skills in his travels with the Red Cross and his techniques as a modern day plastic surgeon crossed boundary lines and contents as he taught other doctors how to help the wounded regain some sense of normality again.

Harold Gillies unfortunately was able to refine his techniques even further with more practice reconstructing faces of soldiers as World War II began, and he had more wounded men to perfect his skills on than he likely wanted. This reconstructive work began to touch on burn victims as well, and his work is still the foundation that cosmetic surgery evolved a great deal of knowledge from.

Today most people likely associate cosmetic surgery with vanity and making people with minor flaws prettier, but as Harold Gillies demonstrated, being a cosmetic surgeon is about more than that. It is about making a difference in the lives of people who aren't just striving to look prettier — they are striving to look normal, even boring, and not be stared at or isolated by society because of disfiguring injuries.

Many patients of plastics today are still soldiers in a different war in a different time, but they are also women with mastectomies, children with cleft palates, burn victims, and victims of car accidents. The one thing all of these people have in common is the fact that they survived physically, and now they want to look normal again. Plastics and the plastic surgeons that make the magic happen are highly skilled general surgeons in addition to being artists who can see the potential where fire, disease, or a birth defect has made that vision hard for others to grasp.

So maybe you only know about plastic surgeons from reality television shows as doctors who are out to beautify America one facelift at a time, but make no mistake — the real heroes of medicine are the doctors who are giving their patients back a quality of life one patient at a time.