Burn Notice: Lay Practitioners, Plastic Surgery, and the Forgotten Origins of the Chemical Peel

Histories of plastic surgery, both popular and academic, typically take World War I as their starting point, framing it as the catalyst for a series of medical innovations that have culminated in the array of procedures available today. From a technological perspective, this makes intuitive sense – the horrific facial injuries wrought by trench warfare necessitated new treatments and spurred a rapid increase in the development of surgical techniques. Less often acknowledged, however, are the ways in which the war was responsible not for the literal invention of technologies, but rather for the gendered associations that would allow such technologies to gain cultural legitimacy and visibility. Plastic surgery has, in fact, been practiced in some form for centuries, and in the decades prior to WWI especially there were many practitioners, often female and informally trained, who sought to improve physical appearances through medical interventions. Whereas the objects of war surgeries were disfigured masculine warriors, however, the objects of the earlier practitioners’ work were usually women expressly seeking to achieve beauty, and therefore these efforts were largely ignored or simply dismissed as quackery by the mainstream. A brief instructive case can be found in the example of the lay practitioners who discovered and refined the chemical peel process. Focusing on materials that significantly predate the war, my paper uses print sources to trace the public rhetoric surrounding these so-called “peelers,” and seeks to restore the scientific contributions of these marginalized innovators to the wider narrative about cosmetic surgery and its roots.