535The History of Blepheroplasty
posted on August 31st, 2009
Although most of the techniques associated with modern cosmetic surgery date from the pioneering efforts of army surgeons of the First World War as they attempted to reconstruct catastrophic facial injuries associated with the new weapons of a mechanized age, the origins of cosmetic surgery go back to ancient Egypt some three thousand years ago.
It was around the time of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II and the 11th Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom that early Egyptian surgeons began to perform reconstructive surgery of the lips, nose and ears by using skin grafts. As these techniques were refined, they spread to the Greeks and eventually to the Romans. It was a Roman surgeon living during the 1st Century of the Common Era who actually first described a procedure for relaxing the eyelids by making a skin excision.
After the fall of Rome and as Europe descended into culture of illiteracy and superstition for several centuries, much of this knowledge was lost, although much of the knowledge of the Hellenistic world had been preserved by Arab scholars which allowed the rediscovery of these techniques during the Italian Renaissance.
It was an early 19th Century surgeon from present-day Poland however who first defined the word blepheroplasty. Karl Ferdinand von Graefe who was actually German became a skilled surgeon early in life and was appointed private surgeon to a local duke at the age of 20. By the age of 25, he was a professor of surgery and director of ophthalmology at the University of Berlin, and served as a supervisor of Prussian military hospitals during the Napoleonic Wars. While best known as the Father of Rhinoplasty (nose surgery), he actually came up with the term blepheroplasty in 1818 to describe the surgical techniques used to reconstruct the eyelids of patients whose eyelids have been deformed as the result of cancer.
While techniques and theory continued to develop over the course of the remainder of the 19th and early 20th centuries, these techniques were put to their most challenging tests as a result of the First World War. The new and obscene weapons resulting from modern industrial technology had caused facial injuries doctors had never imagined. Dr. Harold Gillies performed one of the first modern blepheroplasty operations on a wounded sailor in 1917 using a method which he called the tubed pedicule, allowing blood to nourish skin grafts during the healing process.
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