Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic SurgeryHardcover, 30 September 1998

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 routinely 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, discussing 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 on historically widespread prejudices, Gilman describes the persections, harassment, 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.