Abstract

Medicine is the art of healing, aesthetics the study of our response to art and beauty. What happens when the two come together in the practice of cosmetic surgery? This is my question, a foray into what I will call "medical aesthetics." In what follows, I examine how practitioners of cosmetic surgery and related specialties have appropriated the language of medicine and healthcare to reframe and legitimize various nonmusical elective procedures designed to modify appearance. I being with a short discussion of the history and terminology of cosmetic surgery. Against this background, I critically assess the claim that cosmetic surgery qualifies as a form of healthcare, and hence a legitimate branch of medicine . . . In pressuring medical professionals to place beauty above health, cosmetic surgery and related specialties such as cosmetic dentistry unavoidably raise questions about the definition of medicine itself. In particular, patient demand for what I am labeling "medical aesthetics" may collide with the Hippocratic requirement that physicians "do no harm." It is to those harms and related concerns that I turn in the final section.