'Lead[ing] 'em by the nose into publick shame and derision': Gaspare Tagliacozzi, Alexander Read and the lost history of plastic surgery, 1600-1800

Abstract

This paper discusses the surgical reconstruction of the nose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This procedure was most prominently detailed by the Bolognese surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi in De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem libri duo (Venice: 1597), and he became synonymous with the operation. Histories of plastic surgery currently state that after Tagliacozzi's death in 1599, his procedure disappeared from medical knowledge. I demonstrate that this was not the case through a thorough book history of an English translation of De curtorum chirurgia published in London in 1687 and 1696 that was attached to the collected works of the Scottish surgeon Alexander Read. In the seventeenth century, the disfigured nose became associated with the effects of syphilis and its mercury treatment, and I examine this relationship in order to account for rhinoplasty's stigmatization, and medical resistance to using the procedure that led to its alleged disappearance in the period.