ABSTRACT
Several years ago, I attended a conference on body image and iden tity at the Dutch medical faculty where I had been working for some time in the field of medical sociology. The audience was composed primarily of physicians and medical academics, along with a few social scientists like myself One of the speakers was a well-known plastic sur geon. This particular surgeons talk was all about the wonders of cosmetic surgery in helping people overcome a negative body image. He explained that doctors in his specialty had some unique difficulties in diagnosing their patients. In most medical specialties, patients don’t know what their problem is, and leave it to the specialist to figure out. Not so with cosmetic surgery. Here, it is the patient who knows what’s wrong and the surgeon who often has a hard time seeing it. This leaves him with a dilemma: either he has to send the patient home emptyhanded or he has to find some medically acceptable reason for an intervention as drastic as surgery. To illustrate this point, the speaker gave a slide show with-what else?— before and after pictures. To my surprise, the patient was not a middle-aged woman with wrinkles who wanted a face lift, but a fifteen-year old Moroccan girl who wanted her nose done. According to this surgeon, this girl was only one among many similar cases: second-generation immigrant adolescents who were getting harassed at school for having “noses like that.” They became miserable, antisocial, and developed feelings of inferiority, he explained. It became difficult for them to become assimilated into Dutch society.
