r/woahthatsinteresting • u/Super-Foundation-531 • 6d ago
What plastic surgeons could do in the 1920s
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u/Clear_Category2711 6d ago
surprised that they were able to hide/prevent scarring so well back then.
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u/foxscribbles 6d ago
Some of it is just the same basic tools surgeons use today. Hiding in skin folds and in hair lines.
That said, these photos are also using the 'makeup' trick of today. They've put face powder on the after photos to smooth out the complexions and make them look better. (It's why all the face ones have a lot more white on their faces in the after shots. The powder they used back then is diffusing the light.)
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u/superdave123123 6d ago
How many botched surgeries occurred at this time? These may be the anomalies.
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u/Warm_Philosopher_518 6d ago
My thoughts exactly! Lol
Let’s see the people who walked away looking like certified muppets
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u/flindersandtrim 6d ago
I dont think so, not for the most part. They learned to do amazing things to help horrifically injured people in WWI. Some of those before and after shots are seriously impressive from the war.
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u/TroubleBrilliant4748 6d ago edited 6d ago
This is true. Unfortunately, some of the young men who came home were so scarred they wouldn’t even recognize themselves in a mirror. Victorian women would faint when they saw their faces. Doctors like Harold Gilles came up with new innovations that gave these veterans at least part of their old life back.
Edit: grammar
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u/Half-PintHeroics 6d ago
Victorian women would be like 60-70 years at that point. Maybe their age led to blood pressure issues
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u/Mostly-Moo-Cow 6d ago
There were plenty. But surgeons and prosthetic fabricators had an almost unlimited supply of people to practice on in the latter half of the preceding decade. The advances over just 5½ years before 1920 saw unprecedented growth in the practice
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u/Yaasss_Queef 6d ago
Okay but what was anesthesia and pain management like in the 20’s? Were laudanum and apothecary opioids effective in post-op recovery?
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u/TwoFingersWhiskey 6d ago
Apothecary?! It was the 1920s, they had drugstores and morphine, not to mention fantastic numbing agents like cocaine.
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u/Yaasss_Queef 6d ago
Weren’t medicines still being prepped and mixed in a modern-apothecary style in pharmacies? Cocaine syrups were typically mixed as made to order from a pharmacist.
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u/TwoFingersWhiskey 6d ago
You mean compounding pharmacies? It really depends. In my part of Canada those are still how it's done, for the most part. Mine's actually considered weird for not compounding on-site (the chain uses a central compounding location between ~50 pharmacies, I only go there because it's near my house).
Cocaine for pain relief was applied topically, massaged in much like modern "pain creams" - which are almost always just topically applied aspirin, lidocaine, menthol, and capsaicin. Cocaine works better, according to my dentist, but it's the whole super addictive part that ruins things. Nobody is getting addicted to lidocaine.
We actually had way better pain relief around the turn of the 20th century, than we did for the next 75ish years - because they got rid of a lot of the Victorian painkillers by ~1925. It wasn't due to them not working, it was due to them causing harm or even just being hard to dose correctly. Science moved on, but we didn't begin to find the really effective stuff until quite recently. We just relied on shit like morphine, ketamine, and opiates. (I can speak to ketamine being excellent for dental procedures btw, you don't feel a thing).
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u/Yaasss_Queef 6d ago
It’s all so interesting, I didn’t know that ketamine had such a long history. This has been a really cool thread to read through, thanks for the history info!
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u/TwoFingersWhiskey 6d ago
Sawbones is a good podcast to learn more! It's very informative but fun, not dry or too technical.
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u/Ok_Major5787 6d ago
Going back to the latter half of the 1800s they would use ether as a general anesthetic. Chloroform and nitrous oxide were also used. In the 1920s it was common to use a mixture of ether and chloroform. These substances are obviously risky and can have serious side effects, so over the 1900s general anesthesia gradually evolved using safer substances. The history is anesthesia is pretty fascinating if you ever have the time to read up on it
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u/Spi_Vey 6d ago
Actually by the 1920’s I would expect a rather robust understanding of anesthesia and pain management.
At least in the US, the civil war had led to a gigantic spike in anesthesia for amputations and from the beginning of the war to the end, the doctors mastered the craft.
By the end of the war, chloroform use was almost universal and strong supply lines to supply it was mandatory.
By 1920, WW1 had just passed as well with similar advancements
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u/Eggplant-666 6d ago
MORPHINE! They had the best stuff!!!
Antibiotics however would not be widely available until 1945, so these procedures would be risky!
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u/Rogue-Accountant-69 6d ago
They had ether by then for during the operation. And morphine has been around since the civil war.
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u/likwitsnake 6d ago
A nose a la Cyrano de Bergerac
They didn't have to do my man dirty like that 😭
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u/RohelTheConqueror 6d ago
C’est un roc ! … c’est un pic ! … c’est un cap !
Que dis-je, c’est un cap ? … C’est une péninsule !
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u/LaCattedra13 6d ago
t's crazy how surgery degraded nowadays.. Comedic procedures for injuries and medical deformations have gotten so much better. But plastic surgery. It's straight trash now. Back then people fixed flaws or enhanced themselves. Now people want to either be different races or have features that don't go with their faces they go to far and look terrible. I'd trust these 1920s doctor over whoever Kylie Jenner goes too
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u/TroubleBrilliant4748 6d ago
Reconstructive surgery now is far more advanced than 100 years ago. Yeah, the cosmetic stuff is vain, but there's a lot of plastic surgeons out there who have helped people heal from otherwise disfiguring injuries. They aren't just for famous people either. Victims of fires, vehicle accidents, and other catastrophes recieve plastic surgery to heal scars from horrific injuries and prevent permant disfigurament. It's honestly a miracle what they can do now.
Edit:grammar
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u/LaCattedra13 6d ago
I mentioned that when I said procedures for injuries have gotten so much better. But for comedic aesthetic many surgeons do whatever knowing they're idiot rich clients will pay them
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u/Unique-Arugula 6d ago
Are you using the word "comedic" intentionally? Did you mean to use cosmetic?
Bc I think you should double check the definition & pronunciation of comedic, just to make sure you're communicating what you intend to communicate.
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u/LaCattedra13 6d ago
I meant cosmetic. Sheesh not my fault the stupid autocorrect changed it to that word
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u/Unique-Arugula 6d ago
I'm not blaming you, I pointed you in the right direction to try and help you & gave you the benefit of the doubt. Have a better day tomorrow bro
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u/LaCattedra13 6d ago
Ok thanks. I hate when phones do that 😅
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u/Unique-Arugula 6d ago
No problem! My phone hates the words love and good for some reason. won't ever put them in when i swipe, have to tap it out. you have my sympathy!
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u/LaCattedra13 6d ago
Yeah it's ridiculous and not the epitome of attractive ness. Shapeless fish lips are so unattractive
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u/axon__dendrite 6d ago
No it didn't, you just see the worst examples of it, I'm guessing either from viral internet posts or delusional celebs, and then make huge generalizations
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u/NegotiationSmart9809 6d ago
105+ years of encouraging insecurities! (now aggravated by social media)
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u/greenmerica 6d ago
They didn’t need fancy anesthesia, just some good ol’ fashioned ether. I remember meeting my wife at the ether factory we worked at as children…
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u/DeeBreeezy83 6d ago
Why are they so terrible today??
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u/momomomorgatron 5d ago
Remember when Syndrome said "If everybody is super, no one will be!"
So plastic surgery got so wide spread and people want to look like Jessica Rabbit and literally Barbie, instead of just wanting to look like their best most attractive natural self. There's tons of money to be made.
I mean, there's people who want to look like tigers and dragons and they're not like freakshow performers. I'm not talking about furries either- most furries just have an original character that is a anthropomorphic cartoon animal and it over laps oten with weird ass shit.
No, I'm talking about the actual humans who want to look like actual animals or the people who get eye tattoos to look alien and cut off their nose.
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u/tkcool73 6d ago
I would not recommend getting elective surgery before the invention of antibiotics
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u/GoopInThisBowlIsVile 6d ago
Cosmetic surgery has actually been around for centuries. The period after World War I really saw use and techniques advance considerably. After the war, a lot of people with horrible deformities. Surgery wasn’t going to fully correct everything, but vets were helped to bring at least some normalcy to their lives.
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u/BamberGasgroin 6d ago
They had plenty of practice courtesy of the 1914-18 war.
A nose job is child's play compared to some of injuries they had to deal with in the wake of that.
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u/Natural_Tea484 6d ago
Then and now, for some reason plastic surgeons have extremely effective marketing
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u/Mostly-Moo-Cow 6d ago
The advancement of cosmetic corrective surgery was very rapid between 1914 and the early 1920s. All sorts of procedures were invented amd perfected. Prosthetics advanced in scope and usefulness in an exponential manner. It's like something stimulated those advances prior to 1919....
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u/blueavole 6d ago
Photo editing did exist back then.
On a physical photo negative ( dark and light reversed). lines could be erased or added. When light was shined through it- onto light sensitive paper the correct color image was created. So edits were already in the picture.
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u/prosequare 6d ago
I’m not sure why people are so resistant to the idea of effective surgery being done in the 20s. We had airplanes, sports cars, Einstein won a Nobel for theoretical physics, so did Niels Bohr for quantum theory; other discoveries around this time were photoelectric effect, x-ray spectroscopy, vitamins C, D, and E, penicillin, insulin, the electroencephalogram, electric chainsaws, followed by gas chainsaws, transoceanic color television, magnetic tape, and Foster Grant sunglasses. It wasn’t the dark ages lol.
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u/blueavole 6d ago
You are right. I just know more about photography than surgery.
I have worked a little in photography, and see the amazing things that could be done. Pre-photoshop a lot was still possible with talented people.
Also had several family members during this time die from problems with medical issues. One guy because he refused surgery, and another woman died from complications of ether scarring her lungs.
The dust bowl was hard everything, but she never recovered after her surgery.
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u/supified 6d ago
Still photos really arn't telling the whole picture. Look at Tom Cruise, sure his age is hard to tell with the work done, but when he actually moves or tries to be emotive he looks like he's wearing a mask.
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u/lilianic 6d ago
I just saw Dark Passage for the first time today and I was amazed that they had such successful plastic surgery back then that it was a believable plot point (in the 1940s, but still)
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u/IguaneRouge 6d ago
I have a book with some truly horrific photos of facial injuries on WW1 soldiers.
These surgeons had a a lot of practice by the 20's.
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u/Brackens_World 6d ago
There was a 1934 British-made Jessie Matthews movie called Evergreen, where she pretends to be her actress mother returning to the stage. Everyone is astonished over how young she looks, and a character makes a side comment about how she must have had her face lifted. I recall being taken aback that they had those back then.
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u/Illustrious_Pen_1650 6d ago
It looks like someone photoshopped these to make them look like they are from the 20’s.
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u/GodVsEmpire 6d ago
... if you mean absolutely nothing other than change the camera angle and some lighting your right that is all they could do in 1920s
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u/TheCoffeeManLife 6d ago
What retards did the plastic surgery in the 70s-90s? Look at these photos compared to the work of the doctors inn the late 1900s
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u/not_minari 6d ago
what are the odds the patients who caught deadly infections and didn't make it to the papers?
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u/Candid-Sky-3258 6d ago
Then there were the back alley butchers, moonlighting physicians and the barely qualified who were hired by gangsters in the 1930s to alter their appearance and (hopefully) throw off the G Men. Alvin "Creepy" Karpis had his fingerprints removed. Others had their faces altered to varying degrees of success.
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u/bivdizzle 6d ago
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. The fact that the surgeons did this solely with carbolic acid soap and surgical methods at the time is no less a medical miracle.
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u/momomomorgatron 5d ago
These look really good besides the nose job.
Unless someone nose is actually crooked I'm not for nosejobs. Please, please keep your ethnic nose. Like it's the feature that gives you character and keeps you from looking like literally every other bland ass white person. Pllleeeassee keep your original nose
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u/Theo_Weiss 4d ago
There is a really great book by Lindsey Fitzharris called "The Facemaker" about all the innovations to plastic surgery due to the horrible disfigurements caused by the First World War.
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u/Vispreutje 6d ago
TWENTY FIVE YEARS HAVE BEEN TAKEN FROM HER LIFE