Plastic Surgeon: The First One There Ever Was

It's hard to believe that there was a plastic surgeon over 1500 years ago

, but Sashruta was just that. Dubbed the "Father of Surgery", Sashruta was a doctor that lived in India sometime between 600 BC and 400 AD and wrote the Sashruta Samhita, which is an extensive text on ayurvedic medicine. Ayurveda is a form of traditional medicine that originated in the Indian Subcontinent which covers everything from herbal remedies to surgery.

Sushruta's text divided all of medicine into eight categories, surgery being the most complex and important. Within that surgery section, He outlined the basic techniques used by every modern plastic surgeon today including pre-surgical physiotherapy, use of extra skin to cover birth defects, use and rotation of skin flaps to cover skin loss, skin grafting, rhinoplasty and labioplasty. In fact, the Rhinoplasty, otherwise known as a nose job, was performed in India for over a thousand years and only came to the attention of a British surgeon in 1793 who then brought the practice to Europe.

It's amazing that the Sushruta Samhita lists over one thousand different illnesses, over 700 medicinal plants, over one hundred different kinds of treatments and detailed anatomy descriptions, but the Sushruta even includes descriptions of surgical tools that are in use today. Many of these tools were used specifically for plastic surgery and were adopted and altered by British surgeons that studied plastic surgery in India.

Sushruta also spent a lot of time performing the otoplasty, which entails surgery to correct a damaged or defective ear. During the time of his life, ears were often amputated as punishment for a crime. Sushruta and many a plastic surgeon that came after him used otoplasty techniques to reconstruct these amputated ears.

Trying to determine the years that he lived in India has become a very difficult task because Indian mythologies place him in stories as far back as 1800 BC, but most scholars agree he most likely walked the earth no earlier than 600 BC. This is only, however, the oldest surgeon that successfully left behind any records, which means that there definitely could've been other surgeons before him. In fact, you can safely say that he must have been trained up to some point before he began his many innovations in plastic surgery.

Although plastic surgery seems to be a modern fad that came about recently with the help of modern technology, it turns out that there was a plastic surgeon practicing on the banks of the Ganges river well before the advent of modern western medicine.

by: Abigail Aaronson

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