Plastic Surgery Essay

Plastic surgery is identified as the process of restructuring or fixing parts of the body by the transferal of tissue. Largely, surgeons utilize plastic surgery for the treatment of damage or for cosmetic purposes. As far as history has shown us, the first plastic surgery was found to be implemented in India during the period of the Indus Valley Civilization. India also started practicing reconstructive surgery techniques by around the era of 800 BC. The Romans were also known to perform plastic surgery. Moving ahead into plastic surgery’s developmental history, in the years prior to the First World War, a vast amount of developments were beginning to change the practices of surgery in general, and facial reconstruction in particular. Before

To date, still no surgical advances have sufficiently equipped physicians for the pure viciousness of combat in the trenches of World War I. Sophisticated (at the time) weaponry showered explosives on to hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were in trenches, producing a very large population of men who were facially disfigured, who needed to have facial reconstructive surgery. Physicians of many areas worked with each other on both sides of the trenches: facial surgeons, general surgeons, dental surgeons, oral surgeons, and brain surgeons. These kinds of physicians improvised and worked together to meet every horrendous need as it surfaced, developing on the spot several of the procedures that make up the ways and means of the present-day facial plastic

Harold Gillies industrialized many procedures of modern facial plastic surgery. He fashioned these techniques to be able to help combatants who were in agony from mutilating facial injuries during the First World War. Sir Harold Gillies, supervised a massive treatment center for allied casualties in Kentucky. Throughout the war as well as after the war, Gillies drew in surgeons from many different countries. These surgeons came to learn plastic surgery methods from Gillies himself. There was one facial surgeon who was greatly impacted by his experience in the war with Gillies, and that was Ferris N. Smith, who later went back to the University of Michigan after the war ended and then became one of the most imperative facial plastic surgeons of the era. Ferris Smith recorded his experiences with Gillian in a paper he wrote that was called 2“Plastic Surgery and It’s Interest to the Facial Surgeon” which he then presented at the 1920 meeting of the American Medical Association. Fascinatingly enough, the practices after the war of Smith and Gillies eventually migrated toward more general plastic surgery, and both men ultimately closed their training to fellow facial surgeons. Including Ferris Smith’s trainees were a few men, Reed Dingman and Clarence Straatsman, whom later became the chiefs of plastic surgery at Universities such as Columbia, Michigan, and New