| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. By Sander L. Gilman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xxii, 396 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-691-02672-6.)

This is a fascinating and erudite study of an important human phenomenon that obviously has gained increased significance in modern society. It is also somewhat inchoate, jumping around in periods, areas, and specific topics and in the process downplaying some vital issues. 1

The book's strength is its indefatigable pursuit of examples of aesthetic surgery, mainly but not exclusively in Europe and to a degree the Americas. The author examines a host of cases of aesthetic surgery in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and juxtaposes them to literary references on body ideals. The result is a welcome increase in our knowledge of what became possible when, in combination with rather more predictable cultural explanations of the results to be sought. . . .

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