Aesthetic surgery

custom-made bodies? tensions between expert autonomy and patient expectations in argentine plastic surgery in the first half of the 20th century

Abstract

Aesthetic surgeons deal with patients who have aesthetic expectations and who can evaluate the result of the operation at a glance. Starting from this premise, this article sets out to analyze a series of Argentine medical publications on rhinoplasty from the first half of the 20th century with the aim of identifying the practices, devices and routines devised by these professionals to manage the expectations of candidates for the operation. The article is organized in four parts, which account for different instances of doctor-patient interaction: the diagnostic examination and surgical indication; the psychological evaluation of patients; the “truth” and the “lie” in pre-surgical consultations; and the place of medical photography in the diagnosis, projection and evaluation of results. The article deploys an original approach by addressing an object of study that has been scarcely explored from a historical perspective.