The History of Rhinoplasty ③ — 1794: the moment nose surgery reached Europe

India’s nasal reconstruction went unknown in Europe for a long time.

It was passed down not in medical texts but as the handed craft of particular families.

The technique was kept as a closely held secret in India, and it is said that certain families near Pune practised it generation after generation.

The turning point was a war.

During the Third Anglo-Mysore War in 1792, Cowasjee, an ox-cart driver with the British forces, was captured by the Mysore side and punished by having his nose and one hand cut off.

A year later Cowasjee underwent a nasal reconstruction by the local Indian method, and two physicians attached to the British residency at Pune watched the procedure and recorded it in detail with illustrations, publishing the account in the Madras Gazette.

When that account was reprinted in London’s Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1794, the Indian nasal reconstruction was reported in Europe for the first time.

It ran with a portrait of Cowasjee after his operation and engravings of the stages of the surgery, and the article stirred real interest in plastic surgery among Western physicians.

The English surgeon Carpue read it, studied the technique, and performed his first successful operation on 23 October 1814; when he published his results in 1816 the Indian method spread across Europe.

Reading records like this, there is something that catches at me.

The names of the Indian practitioners who had actually been doing that operation for generations are, for the most part, not preserved. All that was attached to the technique was a label — the Indian flap.

Among the methods we use today there must also be some that began in the hands of someone whose name did not survive.

Technique is not made only in papers and at conferences, and I think this story shows that well.

For my own part I have no wish at all to leave a name behind. I only turn over the thought of doing my best, from where I stand, for the patients who come to me, and of getting a little better at it.