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Part history, part cultural/economic analysis, it explains better than anything else I've read what made American society so vulnerable to the seduction of the knife and the tyranny of visual conformity. As the idea of the perfect, ageless body becomes ever more dominant in our culture, it's important that we—especially women—understand how we've got ourselves into this mess. Venus Envy offers readable, perceptive answers.
(Sarah Dunant The Times of London )Original, well-researched, and a pleasure to read. It constitutes an astute analysis of the modern commodification of the body and the role of the medical profession in such developments.
(Roy Porter Times Higher Education Supplement )An informative, often engaging account of the history of cosmetic surgery in the United States.
(Parade Magazine )[A] very meaty history of plastic surgery. The relevant race and gender issues are thoroughly worked over (one chapter title: 'The Michael Jackson Factor'), and there are enough horror stories about leached silicone and Homely Girl contests to make one permanently swear off the scalpel.
(Entertainment Weekly )This book charts how millions have spent billions to enlarge or shrink body parts. Author Elizabeth Haiken has pitched a big tent. Plastic surgery embraces self-enhancement, prejudice, greed, submission and opportunity. This is about life in a democracy, where (for a price) any boy can be president and any girl can be Miss America.
(Kate Callen San-Diego Union-Tribune )Haiken has written a humane, balanced history of cosmetic surgery, drawing with sensitivity and deftness on impressive archival sources, including surgeons' folders on prospective patients... Her book is a first-class exercise in medical history, raising intriguing questions about normalization, ideological manipulation, gender, ethnicity, and the profit motive in medicine.
(Richard Davenport-Hines Nature )This is an important book, raising provocative questions about the ubiquity of cosmetic surgery in our culture... I'll certainly draw on its insights when counseling patients considering cosmetic surgery.
(Janet E. Shepherd, M.D. Journal of the American Medical Association )An entertaining history and serious analysis of the tensions among professional medicine, entrepreneurial practitioners, and the mutable ideal of beauty that reminds us how unchanging is the American search for self-improvement... If Venus Envy is a history of cosmetic surgery, it is equally a political history of beauty.
(Sharon Lieberman Women's Review of Books )Book Description
The surprising history of cosmetic surgery—and America's quest for physical perfection—from the turn of the century to the present.
In 1923, Americans clamored for an explanation of why Fanny Brice, beloved vaudeville actress, successful comedienne, and star of Florenz Ziegfeld's new Follies, had bobbed her nose. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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From the start (in the 19th century!), Cosmetic Surgery has always been controversial, and its practitioners accused of being quacks, often with justification. More than 100 years ago (in 1892), Rochester, NY surgeon John Orlando Roe published reports about his work doing "intranasal rhinoplasty" (nose jobs), and his success at correcting the then widespread "saddle nose" deformity caused by syphilis. Roe's idea was to build up the depression on noses of people afflicted by "saddle nose" problems, and thus help free them from the public stigma of having contracted a terrible venereal disease. Roe's "nose jobs" were NOT done only to make people prettier. People with "saddle noses" were denied employment and rejected as marriage partners (even though their syphilis episode may have been over).
The politics of Cosmetic Surgery has been thick for a century. Haiken relates the tale of breast enlargements done in the 1960's using techniques of silicone injections. Such operations resulted in terrible tragedies, including amputated breasts. When the special "cosmetic silicone" was withdrawn from the market by its suppliers, quack surgeons CONTINUED to offer the breast enlargement operation (made famous by Carol Doda, a San Francisco night club dancer) using industral silicone, even more dangerous than the withdrawn silicone.
Elizabeth Haiken's book is filled with fascinating graphic illustrations of cosmetic surgery examples and not a few "quack display advertisements" (including a current era ad offering penis enlargement and lengthening by Cosmetic Surgery International. The ad includes both an 800 phone number and an Internet Web Site address!). It also includes detailed discussion and examples of various persons seeking to escape ethnic identity labeling, or at least accused of so doing by detractors.
Haiken has written a valuable and, for all its spectacular examples and gossipy talk, a surprisingly thoughtful and intelligent book. She has combined worthwhile history professor scholarship with clear and fast paced writing style. The result is a book worth buying and reading over and over again.
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