The Edwardians had Cosmetic Surgery & it Wasn't Dissimilar to Today

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Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazán wrote in 1898 a novella titled "La Dentadura" in which a woman is rejected by her lover for having crooked teeth, so she goes to a dentist and has all her teeth removed and replaced by fake ones. The text goes to great lengths to describe how the procedure was done (no anesthesia, all teeth removed over several days), and the character is described to be working class, so when I read it it struck me as a common enough form of surgery that the author knew so much about it and presented it as an option for someone within a lower income bracket. SPOILER: at the end of the story, the woman tries to get her lover back, but he rejects her again when he notices her shiny new teeth because only vain women would choose to have cosmetic surgery. The moral of the story is "f*ck men", I think.

Bernadette rolling over her patterns in the end is just sewing/crafting in a nutshell. No matter how large and nice your table is, you always somehow end up back on the floor.

On a small historical sidenote, while anesthesia as we know it comes out of western medicine, Hanaoka Seishū, a Japanese surgeon is considered to have come up with an anesthesia a few years earlier than the more mainstream western doctors (he was trained by the Dutch and so practiced a fusion or eastern and western medicine). Based on the herbs he used, we can reasonably guess his anesthesia was scopolamine (a sedative) from nightshades and Aconitine ( a numbing agent) from wolfsbane. We still use scopolamine. But Aconitine is considered way too difficult to dose compared to better options. There's a reason in mythology one little flower of it can take down a hulking werewolf, it's super deadly if you get the dose wrong.

“In a society that profits from your insecurities, loving yourself is an act of revolution”- I have no idea

As a nurse who works in addiction medicine and harm reduction, the idea of using cocaine as an injected anesthetic has me screaming. It absolutely works as an anesthetic, but it also causes very significant vasoconstriction to the surrounding blood vessels. That means it's a lot harder for the area around the injection to get oxygen from the blood, and often leads to the tissue dying off and going necrotic. I tell patients all the time that it's safer to smoke or sniff their cocaine rather than inject it for that very reason.

I took a class on the history of beauty way back in undergrad. I remember reading about the paraffin wax fillers and how they had the unfortunate habit of degrading over time, resulting in the injected area becoming smoochy. Also, yes, a lot of cosmetic procedures were used by people trying to "pass" or to avoid being associated with a discriminated against race or ethnic group, even if they themselves weren't from that group. Racism and anti-Semitism were major drivers of this. The motivation was less I want to look pretty, and more I want better job options and to not be mistreated by society. Given this context, it actually makes sense why people would undergo risky procedures. I do wonder if Edwardians had a similar attitude to surgery safety that we do now, i.e. it's so much safer now than it used to be. Their point of comparison was a drunk guy sawing off limbs, so even a rudimentary understanding of anesthesia and hygiene probably seemed safe within context.

OMG!! I think this may be the first time I’m seeing black women in like Victorian or Edwardian clothes!! I’m a black woman and I’ve always liked the style but I just……. Never really knew that people who looked like me ALSO wore those clothes 🤩🤩🤩 I’m like speechless omg! It was so cool to see!!! I audibly gasped when I saw the pictures come across! Like I know this isn’t the point of the video at all, but im so appreciative that you included those photos

It is always delightful to see that the people in the past were still the same people as today. They still had beauty standards, people had insecurities, people still did absolutely crazy things to look "better". To anyone who is reading this, you will never be alone in your problems and you never have been!

Now I am thinking about the cholorform trope used in media and wondering how many characters would have just unintentionally died. My goodness, this was a fascinating deep drive.

I adore this rabbit hole. Bernadette & Dr Christine are an awesome duo. It's awesome to see Sewstine wearing her scrubs on YT. And am pleased but Unsurprised that Bernadette would reach out for professional knowledge.

There is a FASCINATING book by Zara Stone called “Killer Looks: The Forgotten History of Plastic Surgery in Prisons”. A lot of surgical procedures were tested on prisoners - sometimes consensually, to give them confidence to live in the world without committing crimes, and sometimes, errrr, not so consensually. Highly recommend as a follow up to this excellent video!

Oh my goodness, I would never have imagined such goings-on happening. A supremely interesting rabbit hole to have fallen down.

For transatlantic clarity, what you and Christine call elective surgery in the USA does not include much of the elective surgery category in the UK, which here includes any scheduled surgery that is not emergency or trauma, so that big abdominal cancer resection? On an elective list (you choose for it to be that day) The fixation of a broken leg? Trauma; ectopic pregnancy? Emergency. We don't really use the term scheduled although it makes a lot of sense. Also cocaine much more complicated to get hold of when I worked in ENT - first choice is now to combine a local like lidocaine with adrenaline for the combi action Christine describes. (She's being anaesthetic Christine, I can't say Sewstine, can I??)

“sentient meatbags just doing our best to make our meatbags slightly nicer to live in for as long as we’re here” is a sentiment to live by ❤

You know, I actually had a similar thought about tattoos during the period, you never hear about them but yet, you know they undoubtedly existed as people have been getting tattoos for thousands of years. If a person wants one, they're gonna get one, no matter what the larger part of the society around you thinks of them. 🤔

As an MD and future ENT with a special interest in head and neck plastics, this is an intersection of interests SO SPECIFICALLY TAILORED TO ME!!! As soon as cocaine was mentioned I was like yup we still use that in head and neck.... which Christine then proceeded to explain. The rhinoplasty techniques (nose job) outlined are also very similar to today's, and it's funny that you don't perceive ear surgery to be as common when it's still very common (though not as much as nose surgery), though like Christine said, people just don't talk about it that much. That being said, there is a very interesting combination of elective cosmetic and reconstructive surgery nowadays; we reconstruct ears that were underdeveloped (microtia), have odd cartilage twists, etc. and in children and adolescents this cosmetic outcome greatly improves quality of life

One thing I remember is that red hair and freckles were seen as ugly and undesirable in the past (I read it as a child in Victorian-setting books), but I’ve always found those traits beautiful and charming. One thing I still find quite interesting is this whole thing about the ideal in Victorian days being to look pale, since that meant you were rich enough to be able to avoid physical labour outside where you’d get a bit of a suntan. Then, once factory workers and urbanisation created a new class of pale poor people, the ideal became to be tanned since it showed you could afford a vacation to some sunny place. While at the same time, being rich in melanin naturally was of course still bad because the people setting the standards were still rich white people. I think anyone can be beautiful no matter what they look like, and that it’s absurd to insist on only one set of traits to be “beautiful”.

I find the distinction between cosmetic and reconstructive surgery somewhat problematic as even today there is a continuum between purely cosmetic and purely reconstructive. As a teen, I had a jaw reconstruction that was reconstructive for a congenital issue, but it had only moderate results for things like correcting my bite, but had huge impact cosmetically. About 1/2 the surgery was for the medical purpose and the remainder was cosmetically done “while we’re in there.” I wonder how much this sort of gray area is at play with the little historical record we actually have.

The injection of paraffin wax is mentioned in one of Asène Lupin books. A man commented that he had seen Lupin 20 times, but each times he looks different thanks self-administered injection of paraffin the thief did to change it's features. I read it a long time ago and I don't remember which of the 24 books it was, but they were published between 1905 and 1923, so if not Edwardian itself, published by an Edwardian author. But it shows what the general public of that era understood of the procedure.