| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Sander Gilman. Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 179. $21.95.

Sander Gilman's book ostensibly examines the relationships between aesthetic and reconstructive surgery, on the one hand, and psychiatry (primarily psychoanalysis) on the other. The book is, however, an impressively wide-ranging (despite its comparatively short length of 146 pages of text) excavation of the cultural interconnections between beauty, health, race, gender, and illness. Following the development of aesthetic surgery and the psychological theories for and against it, Gilman makes a convincing case for the ways in which stereotypes of race and gender have infused our understanding of health, beauty, ugliness, and disease. 1

Crucial to Gilman's argument is that cosmetic surgery is as much an intervention on the mind (at least according to many of its proponents and critics) as it is on the body. "Central to the project of aesthetic surgery," Gilman writes, "is the assumption that all physical changes are changes to the psyche and that the restoration of the Platonic ideal of beauty and happiness (through the invisibility of the subject) is possible" (p. 29). A further series of relationships frames Gilman's narrative. First, difference (perceived ugliness as shaped by stereotypes of race or gender) leads to unhappiness. Second, unhappiness is identical to sickness. Third, illness requires cure (such as surgical intervention). And, finally, beauty is health. In short, aesthetic surgery rests upon a "somatopsychic" view, which is an inversion of the traditional psychoanalytic psychosomatic model: "For the psychoanalyst, psychic 'misery' is written on the body as physical symptoms; for the aesthetic surgeon, the 'unhappiness' of the patient is the result of the physical nature of the body" (p. 13). Both models presume a malleable and interconnected mind and body. . . .

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