Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery Paperback - 2000

"An extraordinarily learned, endlessly fascinating book that deals with a hot contemporary subject."--Elaine Showalter, Princeton University

"This work is wide-ranging, well-informed, and stimulating in its scholarship. It's also provocative--not in the sense of being outrageous, unbalanced, or politically incorrect but in challenging conventional thinking and forcing readers to question their unspoken assumptions. I found this an engrossing read."--Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London

"Sander Gilman has delivered exactly what the title promises: a cultural history of his subject. By trawling a remarkably wide range of material, from surgical papers to novels, high art and films, he has produced a nuanced history of an important discipline within modern surgery. As with all of Gilman's work, the marriage of text and image contributes much to the impact of this major contribution to our understanding of that most welcome intimate of subjects: the history of the body."--W. F. Bynum, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London

"Sander Gilman has done it again. This is a splendid book, rich in interpretation and rich with refrences. The European aspect of the history of cosmetic surgery has not been so fully developed before Gilman brought together the cultural and the medical parts of the story. His wide-ranging references are themselves are worth the price of admission."--Gert H. Brieger, Johns Hopkins University