Product Description: Cosmetic surgery represents an extreme form of modern grooming. It is the fastest growing medical specialty, yet misconceptions abound about those who undertake it and their reasons for doing so. With a grounded approach, engaging 30 women through in-depth interview, this study explores how they chose cosmetic surgery as an option...read more

Product Description: Practices of cosmetic surgery have grown exponentially in recent years in both over-developed and developing worlds. What comprises cosmetic surgery has also changed, with a plethora of new procedures and an extraordinary rise of non-surgical operations...read more

The author describes how lack of self-esteem, dark family secrets, and an obsession with her appearance and a quest for perfection led to a series of plastic surgeries, her alienation from family and friends, and a downward spiral of theft, bankruptcy, and a bad relationships, before she began her recovery. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity.For a cultural practice to develop such a tenacious grip, Blum argues, it must be fed from multiple directions: some pragmatic, including the profit motive of surgeons and the increasing need to appear young on the job; some philosophical, such as the notion that a new body is something you can buy or that appearance changes your life. Flesh Wounds is an inquiry into the ideas and practices that have forged such a culture. Tying the boom in cosmetic surgery to a culture-wide trend toward celebrity, Blum explores our growing compulsion to emulate what remain for most of us two-dimensional icons. Moving between personal experiences and observations, interviews with patients and surgeons, and readings of literature and cultural moments, her book reveals the ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity in contemporary culture.

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Product Description: This is the first book to tell the reader what surgeons cannot tell their patients-what it is really like to undergo cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgeons acknowledge the difficulty of fully informing patients about the range of emotions and physical experiences that can occur days, months and even years after cosmetic surgery...read more

Why do physicians who’ve taken the Hippocratic Oath willingly cut into seemingly healthy patients? How do you measure the success of surgery aimed at making someone happier by altering his or her body? Sander L. Gilman explores such questions in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, a cultural history of the connections between beauty of body and happiness of mind. Following these themes through an impressive range of historical moments and players, Gilman traces how aesthetic alterations of the body have been used to “cure” dissatisfied states of mind. In his exploration of the striking parallels between the development of cosmetic surgery and the field of psychiatry, Gilman entertains an array of philosophical and psychological questions that underlie the more practical decisions rountinely made by doctors and potential patients considering these types of surgery. While surveying and incorporating the relevant theories of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Menninger, Paul Schilder, contemporary feminist critics, and others, Gilman considers the highly unstable nature of cultural notions of health, happiness, and beauty. He reveals how ideas of race and gender structured early understandings of aesthetic surgery in discussions of both the “abnormality” of the Jewish nose and the historical requirement that healthy and virtuous females look “normal,” thereby enabling them to achieve invisibility. Reflecting upon historically widespread prejudices, Gilman describes the persecutions, harrassment, attacks, and even murders that continue to result from bodily difference and he encourages readers to question the cultural assumptions that underlie the increasing acceptability of this surgical form of psychotherapy. Synthesizing a vast body of related literature and containing a comprehensive bibliography, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the histories of medicine and psychiatry, and in philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish cultural studies, and race and ethnicity. (view table of contents)

Offers advice on choosing a cosmetic surgeon, discusses liposuction, face lifts, and breast implants, and discusses risks and benefits

Describes each step of the process for facelifts, breast augmentation or reduction, liposuction, and other common cosmetic surgical procedures, and explains what to expect during the recovery period

Discusses the psychological impact of plastic surgery, and looks at the social pressures on women to achieve a certain type of image (view table of contents)

Product Description: A Patients guide to Plastic Surgery