List of figures

In 1597, Gaspare Tagliacozzi published a famous two-volume book on " plastic surgery. " The reconstructive technique he described was based on grafting skin taken from the arm onto the mutilated parts of the patient's damaged face – especially noses. This paper focuses on techniques of grafting, the " culture of grafting, " and the relationships between surgery and plant sciences in the sixteenth century. By describing the fascination with grafting in surgery, natural history, gardening, and agronomy the paper argues that grafting techniques were subject to delicate issues: to what extent it was morally acceptable to deceive the eye with artificial entities? and what was the status of the product of a surgical procedure that challenged the traditional natural/artificial distinction? Finally, this paper shows how in the seventeenth century grafting survived the crisis of Galenism by discussing the role it played in teratology and in controversies on the uses the new mechanistic anatomy. K E Y W OR D In the second half of the sixteenth century, a group of professors of anatomy and surgery in Bologna began practicing a complex procedure of surgical reconstruction of mutilated parts of the face: lips, ears, and especially noses. The most famous of them was Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1545–1599), who published a detailed version of the procedure in his monumental two-volume De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem (1597). The technique was a procedure of grafting. It consisted in cutting and preparing a skin flap on the upper region of the arm—and the graft had to be constituted only by the skin, not by the flesh of the arm, as many believed in those days—making it adhere to the defective nose by keeping the two parts bound together for about three weeks, severing the flap from the arm, shaping the new parts of the nose, and finally making sure that the outcome would last by using special molds (figs. 1–2). This technique was not new; in the fifteenth century, it was known by two Southern Italian families of

Skin Grafts - Indications, Applications and Current Research, 2011

Facial Plastic Surgery, 2014

Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, 1995

PubMed, 2019

Techniques for reconstructing nasal defects in burns are very limited because the surrounding scar tissue makes it difficult to use local flaps. The authors report their experience using the Converse scalping flap harvested from scarred skin, placed as a mass on the nasal area, then secondarily carved to shape the nose and covered by a skin graft. This is a retrospective study of 4 patients, 3 men and 1 woman, with an average age of 45 years, who were operated on between 1994 and 2013 using this technique for postburn nasal reconstruction. Patients had 45% burns on average. The flap was weaned from its donor site at the third week and the frontalis donor area grafted. Several months later, the flap was sculpted from the outside to the inside in the three dimensions, removing the scarred epidermal areas to restore the aesthetic units of the nose, which were grafted using a full thickness skin graft. The final aesthetic result of the nasal reconstruction was evaluated by the patient and the surgical team. The four nasal reconstructions were carried out to completion. Three were rated as 'very good' (75%) and one was rated as 'good' (25%). The Converse flap modification, referred to as the "carved flap", to reconstruct the burned nose is a reliable technique, possible on a scarred forehead with no additional donor site morbidity.

Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 2010

Seminars in Plastic Surgery, 2013

Eplasty, 2017

Clinics in Plastic Surgery, 2005

The story of Scripture (on the Christian view) opens with an account of a triune God who creates the heavens and earth over the course of a seven-day week. What's the connection between these numbers? Could a triune God have created the world over any period of time he chose? No doubt he could. But a sevenfold week seems particularly apt. It also sheds light on one of Genesis 1’s more unusual details, namely God’s reluctance to ‘look’ at Day Two’s events.