Development of British Plastic Surgery

Plastic Surgery in Britain has its origins in the flourishing of surgical science after John Hunter in the late 18th century.

It begins with a strange story from India, and a pioneering surgeon-scientist, who probably prompted the spread of plastic techniques throughout Europe. There was then relatively slow progress until the First World War, when another man essentially invented the specialty of Plastic Surgery. Sluggish development returned in the inter-war years before British Plastic Surgery’s rapid expansion and development during and after the Second World War.