Creating Beauty To Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery

Why do physicians who have taken the Hippocratic Oath willingly cut into seemingly healthy patients? How do you measure the success of surgery aimed at making someone happier by altering his or her body? This text explores such questions, offering a cultural history of the connections between beauty of the body and happiness of mind. In his exploration of the parallels between the development of cosmetic surgery and the field of psychiatry, Gilman entertains an array of philosophical and psychological questions that underlie the more practical decisions routinely made by doctors and potential patients considering these types of surgery. The author considers the cultural notions of health, happiness and beauty, and reveals how ideas of race and gender structured early understandings of aesthetic surgery in discussions of both the abnormality of the Jewish nose and the historical requirement that healthy and virtuous females look normal , thereby enabling them to achieve invisibility. The book explores the persecutions, harassment, attacks and even murders that continue to result from bodily differences and encourages readers to question the cultural assumptions that underlie the increasing acceptability of this surgical form of psychotherapy.