An Account of Two Successful Operations for Restoring a Lost Nose

CARPUE, Joseph Constantine (1764-1846). An Account of Two Successful Operations for Restoring a Lost Nose. London: Cox and Baylis for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1816. 4° (285 x 218mm.) Stipple-engraved, colour-printed frontispiece and 4 plates, one etched [after Tagliacozzi] and 3 stipple-engraved by Charles Turner, 2 of which colour-printed, woodcut illustration. Half-title and errata leaf. (Repairs in the margins, occasional light soiling.) Modern morocco, by Roger Powell, conservation report pasted to the inside rear cover. Provenance: Melville Hospital, Chatham (library stamp on half-title). FIRST EDITION OF CARPUE'S CLASSIC OF PLASTIC SURGERY, and the most important work on reconstructive surgery since Tagliacozzi. Carpue's account 'represents more than any other book the beginning of modern plastic surgery. Tagliacozzi's treatise on making a nose from an arm flap, De Curtorum Chirurgia per insitionem (Venice: 1597), was an outstanding work, but the world was not ready for it. The condemnation of Tagliacozzi's operation by religious authorities resulted in almost complete cessation of its practice. Reconstructive surgery subsided into two more centuries of deep sleep' (McDowell). Carpue here describes procedures following the 'Hindu' technique of rhinoplasty (which employed a forehead flap) on two British Army officers. These accounts are introduced by a historical survey of both the 'Hindu' and the 'Taliacotian' methods. Carpue's work was translated into German and published in 1817 with a foreword by Carl von Graefe, the pioneer of rhinoplasty in Germany and developer of the 'German' method. Garrison-Morton 5737; Lowndes p. 377; McDowell, 'Introduction' to the Classics of Medicine Library reprint of Carpue, Birmingham, 1981, p. ix; Waller 1781; Wellcome II, p. 304.…