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Making the Body Beautiful
A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery
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Making the Body Beautiful
$11400
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
Ideal for readers interested in the intersections of health, culture, and identity, as well as those fascinated by medical history, sociology, and anthropology. The book appeals to an academic and general audience seeking a deep yet accessible understanding of aesthetic surgery's social and historical contexts.
A study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies.
An extraordinarily learned, endlessly fascinating book that deals with a hot contemporary subject. -- Elaine Showalter, Princeton University This work is wide-ranging, well-informed, and stimulating in its scholarship. It's also provocative--not in the sense of being outrageous, unbalanced, or politically incorrect but in challenging conventional thinking and forcing readers to question their unspoken assumptions. I found this an engrossing read. -- Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London Sander Gilman has delivered exactly what the title promises: a cultural history of his subject. By trawling a remarkably wide range of material, from surgical papers to novels, high art and films, he has produced a nuanced history of an important discipline within modern surgery. As with all of Gilman's work, the marriage of text and image contributes much to the impact of this major contribution to our understanding of that most welcome intimate of subjects: the history of the body. -- W. F. Bynum, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London Sander Gilman has done it again. This is a splendid book, rich in interpretation and rich with refrences. The European aspect of the history of cosmetic surgery has not been so fully developed before Gilman brought together the cultural and the medical parts of the story. His wide-ranging references are themselves are worth the price of admission. -- Gert H. Brieger, Johns Hopkins University
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Description
Nose reconstructions have been common in India for centuries. South Korea, Brazil, and Israel have become international centres for procedures ranging from eyelid restructuring to buttock lifts and tummy tucks. Argentina has the highest rate of silicone implants in the world. Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture.
Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "nose job" as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to "pass," to be seen as a member of a group with which they want to or need to identify.
Gilman begins by addressing basic questions about the history of aesthetic surgery. What surgical procedures have been performed? Which are considered aesthetic and why? Who are the patients? What is the place of aesthetic surgery in modern culture?
He then turns his attention to that focus of countless human anxieties: the nose. Gilman discusses how people have reshaped their noses to repair the ravages of war and disease (principally syphilis), to match prevailing ideas of beauty, and to avoid association with negative images of the "Jew," the "Irish," the "Oriental," or the "Black". He examines how we have used aesthetic surgery on almost every conceivable part of the body to try to pass as younger, stronger, thinner, and more erotic.
Gilman also explores some of the extremes of surgery as personal transformation, discussing transgender surgery, adult circumcision and foreskin restoration, the enhancement of dueling scars, and even a performance artist who had herself altered to resemble the Mona Lisa.
The book draws on an extraordinary range of sources. Gilman is as comfortable discussing Nietzsche, Yeats, and Darwin as he is grisly medical details, Michael Jackson, and Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own nose. The book contains dozens of arresting images of people before, during, and after surgery.
This is a profound, provocative, and engaging study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies.
Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?
Praised as a rich, elegant, and thought-provoking study, the book has been lauded for its wide-ranging scholarship and ability to address complex cultural questions. Reviewers highlight Gilman's skill in linking the history of aesthetic surgery to broader human desires for identity and belonging, describing it as both readable and richly comic. The work is recognised for its profound perspective that plastic surgery transcends contemporary trends, probing enduring issues around appearance and self-perception.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780691070537
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 12 November 2000
Country: United States
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Illustration: 95 halftones
Audience: Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Width: 152.0mm
Height: 235.0mm
Weight: 539g
Pages: 424
About the Author
Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago; he is also Director of the Humanities Laboratory there. He is the author or editor of over fifty books, including Seeing the Insane, Jewish Self-Hatred, The Jew's Body, Hysteria: A New History, and Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton).
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