"The patient is first laid down and the surgeon with a small razor cuts a triangular piece of skin from the forehead."

I knew that people were getting cosmetic surgery in the 1800s, but I didn’t know that actual noses were being created from human flesh. From the July 22, 1888 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, an article originally published in the London Standard:

“They are discussing artificial noses in Vienna, it seems, and the savants take credit for a grand advance of science in this age over the immemorial methods of the East. Probably enough, their congratulations are justified; but we should have more faith if they showed better acquaintance with the methods they condemn. It is not the fact that Oriental surgeons take a strip of flesh from some other person’s body and make of it a new nose for their patient. That is a European practice of late date, and if Viennese authorities disapprove it they must quarrel with their confreres. The Eastern practice is ‘immemorial’ indeed, and for so many ages it has been used with success that neither operators nor sufferers are likely to change it. That practice is absolutely the same which the professors assert to be a modern triumph. Mr. Baden Powell, in his great work upon the arts and manufactures of the Punjab, describes it: ‘The patient is first laid down and the surgeon with a small razor cuts a triangular piece of skin from the forehead, which he dexterously twists just at the juncture of the nose with the brow so as to bring the right side of the skin to the front, etc., exactly as our scientific people do. It is a process hereditary in certain families of the Kangra district, where it was likely this art was exercised before Vienna was heard of.”