You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Sander Gilman's book on the rise of cosmetic surgery in Western society considers the perceived relationship between happiness and bodily appearance. His study traverses a wide range of materials, from syphlitic saddle noses to Freud and Fliess's efforts to cure Emma Eckstein through her nose to the self-congratulatory statistics of postoperative patient happiness related at a recent meeting of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Central to the study is what Gilman points to as the co-emergence of the somatopsychic practices of psychoanalysis and aesthetic surgery. Importantly, “the decline of the stigma associated with aesthetic surgery is keyed to the change in the stigma associated with mental illness” (11). What remains unclear, however, is why so much attention is devoted to the Jewish nose in particular with little attention paid to other racial traits. Perhaps because of the book's title, one is led to imagine a more extensive account of the racialization of the body and aesthetic surgery.
Gilman explores numerous sources, both contemporary and historical, in his discussion of what the culture in general and surgeons in particular construct as the relationship between the mind