Skin grafts were used even in 800 B.C for reconstructive surgery. A severed ear may have been grafted onto the body, or a cut finger might have been sutured back and hereby lay the beginnings of plastic surgery.

People have always been enamored by beauty and everyone would like to be beautiful, plastic surgery had ready patients down the ages.

Medical history records that Dr John Peter Mettauer born in Virginia in 1787 was the first plastic surgeon of the US. The horrors of war saw victims with faces and limbs torn off by bomb blasts. This led to a fast development of plastic surgery in the 1800s and 1900s. After World War I there were many shattered faces, blown of noses, gaping wounds and the like which had to be filled and reconstructed by plastic surgery. The word plastic in plastic surgery means mold or give form in Greek, from the word ‘plastikos’ and does not mean artificial in any sense of the term. Plastic surgery includes both aesthetic or cosmetic surgery and reconstructive surgery. Plastic surgery methods made rapid progress and by the end of the last century great progress was made and more and more people were opting for plastic surgery procedures such as face lifts, Pubic liposuction, breast implants and more. Invention of newer methods of restructuring and the invention of many medicines has made plastic surgery reach the common man who now has the option to go in for cosmetic purposes as well.

Filed under: Beauty

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