Rhinoplasty and the nose in early modern British medicine and culture

Emily Cock

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526137166
• eBook ISBN: 9781526137180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Challenging histories of plastic surgery that posit a complete disappearance of Gaspare Tagliacozzi's rhinoplasty operation after his death in 1599, Rhinoplasty and the nose in early modern British medicine and culture traces knowledge of the procedure within the early modern British medical community, through to its impact on the nineteenth-century revival of skin-flap facial surgeries. The book explores why such a procedure was controversial, and the cultural importance of the nose, offering critical readings of literary noses from Shakespeare to Laurence Sterne. Medical knowledge of the graft operation was accompanied by a spurious story that the nose would be constructed from flesh purchased from a social inferior, and would drop off when that person died. The volume therefore explores this narrative in detail for its role in the procedure's stigmatisation, its engagement with the doctrine of medical sympathy, and its unique attempt to commoditise living human flesh.

1
Reading and disguising faces

This chapter introduces the problem posed by Taliacotian rhinoplasty by examining corporal legibility and the types of bodily modification imagined, available, accepted, or ridiculed in early modern Britain. It explores the fine line between styling and falsifying the body as the limits of accepted body work, and the representation of such techniques in early modern British literature. I argue for a persistent suspicion about the capacity of identity to be masqueraded even at the level of the skin and flesh, enabling the individual to pass for a member of a socially superior group (the healthy, the virtuous) by altering their body in significant ways. To this end, I first discuss the many and varied associations made around the nose in order to introduce why surgical interventions in this part carried significant cultural weight. I then discuss surgical interventions in the face, including the provision of prosthetic noses, to demonstrate the range of accepted surgical responses to facial and specifically nasal disfigurement.

The most widespread satirical treatments of this theme focus on female bodies. Women, and especially prostitutes, were derided as commercialised bodies, indistinguishable from the commodities that they employed to make themselves more marketable. This trope was played out in well-known texts from Ben Jonson's Epicœne (1609) to Jonathan Swift's ‘The Lady's Dressing Room’ (1732), and in lesser-known satires like Newes from Hide-Park (c. 1642), playing extensively with the capacity of the body to be manipulated and used for commercial gain. Elsewhere, duplicitous male figures are also found manipulating their bodies and behaviour. Thomas Duffet's The Amorous Old Woman, or ’Tis Well If It Take (1674) subversively engages with the stereotype of the rich old woman using corporal artifice to appear younger and more beautiful by rewarding her at the expense of an elderly male miser whose own corporal duplicity involves an attempt to hide his blindness. Thomas D’Urfey's The Fond Husband, or the Plotting Sisters (1677) also ridicules an elderly man for using bodily deceits in his attempt to court a much younger woman. These plays therefore launch my discussion of male corporal manipulations and body work, which has received significantly less attention in modern criticism. Tagliacozzi had identified his expected patients as elite martial men, and the manipulation of military injuries for the sake of social, economic, and political advantage was a known concern – stretching from the problem of ‘sturdy beggars’ to the machinations of politicians such as Henry Bennet, First Earl of Arlington, and the undercutting of such marks in satires like Hudibras. This discussion prepares the ground for satirical representations of male noses procured through Tagliacozzi's procedure.

Sumptuary laws are well known as evidence that, far from dressing ‘appropriately’ for their rank, individuals attempted to dress in aspirational ways that belied their social position. With ‘the rise of the anonymous city’, Peter Burke has argued, the concern for disjuncture between an individual's appearance and their identity grew.¹ Miriam Eliav-Feldon takes this further, arguing that ‘Renaissance and Reformation Europe suffered from an obsession concerning identification and from a deep anxiety that things were not what they seemed and people were not who they said they were’.² Ostentatious clothing, as Margaret Pelling notes, could hide the scars and marks of past illnesses, creating an illusion of health and beauty.³ In Restoration England, Will Pritchard has argued, ‘[a]s a result of their persistent suspicion of behavioural signs, [Restoration] authors often appealed to bodily signs as truer indicators of personal identity… Behaviour could be feigned, bodies could not.’⁴ While the capacity for the body to be modified had in no way reached the state it would in the twentieth and twenty-first-centuries – which is the understandable focus of most studies of ‘body modification’ – the manipulation of the self at the level of skin and flesh was by no means unknown. Aside from cosmetics, wigs, or surgery, cleanliness was held to be one of the marks of gentility – what then of the use of perfumes, powders, and a vigorous scrub that might hide the scent and appearance of a lower rank, poor health, or even – for King Lear – ‘mortality’?⁵ As anxiety over sumptuary regulations and Eliav-Feldon's discussion of other outward markings tied to identity shows, the closer an interpretative link between the exterior and identity is drawn, the easier imposture becomes. This is one of the sources of anxiety in body work discussed here: from the manipulation of scars as evidence of honourable military service, to the restoration of the nose.

‘The chiefe beauty of the face’: the nose in early modern Britain

The nose accumulated a diverse range of meanings in early modern Europe. In justifying his nasal focus in De curtorum chirurgia, Tagliacozzi wrote at great length on the ‘dignity, beauty, and splendour of the nose’, arguing that ‘[m]en consider there to be no greater ignominy to inflict on someone than to defile this part’.⁶ The nose was the primary entrance point of Adam's body in Genesis 2:7, as God ‘breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’. Tagliacozzi writes about the different types of nose, and echoes popular assumptions about correlations between physiognomy and character:

if the top part of it is slender, it indicates a quick temper; if it is thick and depressed, we may infer a depraved character. If the nose is full, solid, and blunt, like a lion's or a hound's, this is a sign of bravery and boastfulness. An elongated, thin, beaky nose also indicates a bold personality. A sloping nose is a sign of respectability in conduct and character. A straight nose, on the other hand, suggests loquacity; a sharp nose, anger. A blunt nose indicates wantonness. A hooked or aquiline nose reveals a royal spirit and magnanimity; a flat, simian nose (like Socrates’) suggests immodesty and an affinity for women of ill repute. A small nose indicates deceit and greed, while a fuller nose signifies strength of mind and body. A roundish, stopped-up nose is a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: To supply the scandalous want of that obvious part
• 1 Reading and disguising faces
• 2 Taliacotian rhinoplasty
• 3 The circulation of surgical knowledge
• 4 Satirising sympathy
• 5 Dear flesh: noses on sale
• Conclusion: Changing noses, changing fortunes
• Works cited
• Index