A Nose Is a Nose Is a Nose

Rhinoplasty is the flossy name that surgeons give to fixing up noses. Manhattan Plastic Surgeon 'Jacob Daley thinks many rhinoplasties are mistakes because surgeon and patient forget about art. "Art takes the high road and seeks to create the unusual," Dr. Daley explains, "rhinoplasty takes the low road and seeks to remove all traces of it."

Mindful of the many broken-nosed sol diers now getting straightened up for civil ian life, Dr. Daley reiterated (in the Archives of Otolaryngology} one of his favorite doctrines : when it comes to noses, nature knows best. Many a far-from-ideal nose, says he, should be left as it is. It may be the oddly-shaped nose, that gives character to the whole face. A homely person who blames all his homeliness on his nose may find that a nicer new one calls attention to his small eyes or his snaggle teeth.

To prove his point, Dr. Daley had an artist make tracings of Mono, Lisa, Titian's Man in a Red Cap and Holbein's Erasmus and alter the tracings to show how "dull and uninteresting" they look with noses altered to suit modern standards. As further evidence he has kept his own magnificently large, arched, craggy and overhanging neb.

Rhinoplasty, Dr. Daley thinks, is a desperate expedient, justified only if 1) a nose cannot be breathed through, 2) a nose is so monstrously nasal that it attracts attention to itself instead of being a harmonious part of the face or 3) a nose is spoiling its owner's life (or he thinks it is) by making him feel unhappy and shy.

To help him decide whether a patient is really nasally desperate, Dr. Daley makes photographs from several angles, draws mysterious lines on the pictures and compares them with similar lines drawn on a sketch of an ideal face. Then he plans a compromise--somewhere between the patient's original nose and the ideal. Finally he tries it out on a wax cast. In the end, a patient who started with a broad, concave, bulbous-tipped nose will turn into no beauty: he will merely get a nose that is a little less broad, a little less concave, a little less bulbous.

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