Christine Slobogin's new book, Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper: How Art and Archives Defined Second World War Reconstructive Surgery in Britain, shows how plastic surgery in the twentieth century was a medical discipline with deep ties to art, artists and art history. It was also a field still in the process of creating its reputation and its archives. This book, and this talk, examines these archives, focusing in particular on works on paper by two artists: Diana "Dickie" Orpen and Percy Hennell. Plastic surgeons depended upon the drawings and photographs made by these and other medical illustrators to craft certain narratives about their field and their surgical practice. This art historian's perspective on reconstructive plastic surgery offers a new interdisciplinary approach that reveals how art shaped the material, professional, emotional, and aesthetic parameters of the field.
Originally published at reilly.nd.edu.