The average individual on the street if you asked them what plastic surgery was
they'd tell you it was Botox and fillers.
We cover literally from head to toe
and operate on systems from bones to blood vessels, from muscles to nerves.
Plastic surgery has a dual value.
One is that it solves a problem such as an open wound or a deficient part and the
second aspect of it has to do with the emotional reaction of the person who has
that problem.
We can usually help about 90% of the patients that walk into our offices.
It is a field that I think very few plastic surgeons have ever regretted going into.
Plastic surgery - the name implies an artificial substance - but it is derived
from the Greek 'plastikos" meaning to mold or give form.
Indeed that has been happening here.
An important specialty has been taking shape, one that reshapes the lives of patients.
The plastic surgeons and teachers at Johns Hopkins have themselves been formed
by more than a century of history.
They are building upon the foundation laid by pioneers in this country and overseas.
One of them is Milton Edgerton.
Dr. Edgerton is himself a link to the founder of the Johns Hopkins program.
John Staige Davis played an important early role not only at Hopkins but in the
United States in plastic surgery.
He was the first plastic surgeon in the sense that he limited his practice to that field.
He was the only plastic surgeon we had when World War I broke out.
In 1919 Dr. Davis publishes the first English language textbook of plastic surgery
and it is still used today.
He sends copies to medical school founders, doctors Halsted and Welch,
and Dean Williams. Not one of them acknowledges receiving it.
And though plastic surgery at Hopkins would not gain the standing it deserved
until the next century Dr. Davis is helping build the foundation for the entire discipline
of plastic surgery in America.
He pioneers the tissue transfer technique know as Z-plasty and the use of small deep
grafts to heal chronic wounds. He is a founding member of the American
Board of Surgery and the American Board of Plastic Surgery.
Dr. Davis' work and reputation starts Hopkins on its way to becoming a crossroads
and destination for the country's best plastic surgeons.
He's a very, very charismatic individual,
very important for us being recognized on a national basis.
In 1942 John Staige Davis is a part time faculty member and running a plastic
surgery clinic even though he is now 70 years old and beyond retirement age.
Two years later a fourth year medical student at Hopkins has the chance to
observe the master surgeon.
I was able to scrub in and watch
Dr. John Staige Davis do a cleft lip repair.
It was all new to me and I was sort of surprised when I got into the operating
room as I saw him bring this tiny baby into his lap.
He seemed to me to be operating upside down.
As he proceeded through the operation one thing was obvious - he was very gentle in
the way he handled the tissue.
After graduation Dr. Edgerton joins the Army, marries research scientist Patricia Jones,
and serves at Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania.
He is one of the few surgeons treating thousands of men coming back from combat
with disfiguring wounds and burns needing plastic surgery.
In today's wars we're very, very good at evacuating and resuscitating individuals
on an immediate basis.
But because these individuals survived it's a challenge to the medical profession
to rehabilitate them to an optimum degree.
It's one of the few advances in medicine
that come as a result of wartime.
The horrendous war injuries united skilled surgeons in their desire to heal
grievously wounded soldiers. This dynamic gave rise to a new
and important specialty in medicine.
Dr. Edgerton brings his hard won expertise back to Johns Hopkins.
He becomes the first resident of the newly established Division of Plastic
Surgery in 1949.
He serves under plastic surgery chiefs William Longmire and Edward Hanrahan
before taking over the division himself in 1951.
Milton Edgerton is a founding member of the Plastic Surgery Research Council.
The council has since become the world's leading organization devoted to research
in plastic surgery.
By now a world renowned craniofacial surgeon Dr. Edgerton initiates the practice of
immediate reconstruction at the time of head and neck cancer surgery.
During his tenure Johns Hopkins establishes one of the earliest
interdisciplinary clinics for cleft palate and craniofacial surgery.
He performs the first US craniofacial operation for hypertolerism,
the abnormally wide space between the eyes following Dr. Paul Tessier of France.
In the next 20 years my predecessor, Jack Hoopes, continued to pioneer operations
that revolutionized how defects were reconstructed. On his watch early microsurgeries which
revolutionized plastic surgery are performed at Hopkins.
Dr Hoopes oversees the education of young physicians who would later become leaders
in the field. He also nurtures the combined plastic
surgery residency program with the University of Maryland Medical Center.
In 1990 Paul Manson is tapped to run the Plastic Surgery Division.
Like his predecessor he holds the position for 20 years.
He had a very robust division and had done many things in his career revolutionizing
the way we treated mandible and facial fractures when he was faculty over at
Shock Trauma. He's the one that convinced me that
departmental status for plastic surgery would lead them to even more greatness
than he has achieved as a Division Chief
and frankly that's why he is so amazing. He looked to the future plastic surgery
and what it meant to be a department
and how it would build on his success.
I must admit that Dr. Edgerton was the first one to tell me we
needed a department of plastic surgery
even a few years before we were ready.
The reason it means so much to plastic surgery is that it gives the department
chairman an opportunity to charge his own
course in making professional decisions.
But who would be charting this new course?
We really scoured the country and Andy's name came up really number one.
He was doing the most innovative things in plastic surgery, he was well respected,
he had built a great program at Pittsburgh, he had had Hopkins beginnings
and trainings here, and it seemed like he was going to be a perfect match for this institution.
I told Dr. Miller that I wanted to build at Hopkins
the number one Plastic Surgery Department
in the number one hospital.
Dr. Lee has experience at first.
In 2009 he leads the team that performs the first double hand transplant in the US.
The next year his team performs the first above-elbow transplant.
We will build upon our teamwork,
collaborate with the sister disciplines in the institution, mentor and promote the
brightest young minds in the country
and take our innovation to a higher level.
And what might plastic surgery at Johns Hopkins look like at this higher level for
both practitioners and patients?
Many medical students saw plastic surgery as only related to cosmetic surgery and I
think with Andy coming here the broad field of helping people with disfiguring
illnesses related to cancer or automobile accidents or other types of accidents the
fact that we're able to do hand and arm transplants, this is a whole expanding
field that we have not had before. The thing that we think is so important
about the Department of Plastic Surgery is their partnership with our transplant
where their research laboratory now is housed right next to our transplant researchers.
We're going to look at better ways to have patients tolerate transplants -
not only liver, kidney, heart but now limbs and faces which is what Dr. Lee
is going to help us master.
With a scientific foundation in tissue regeneration, transplantation, and stem
cell biology plastic surgery is uniquely poised to make the next major advances in medicine.
By regenerating or replacing missing body parts plastic surgery can transform
patient life in ways that could not have been imagined only recently.
John Staige Davis didn't live to see plastic surgery receive the recognition
and support it required and deserved here
but his path-breaking work and clear vision allowed a greater dream to be realized.
Today Johns Hopkins is a world leader in the practice of transforming people's lives.
Surgeons study here and share what they've learned at hospitals all over the world.
Men, women, and children from around the world enter this hospital with physical
disfigurements and psychological trauma from wounds, burns, and diseases.
They leave healed and restored.
The profession that reshapes tissue reshapes lives and it is itself being
reshaped with each new resident, original idea, and innovative technique.
That is the history of plastic surgery at Johns Hopkins and it is its future.