Why Is It Called ‘Plastic Surgery’?

Plastic surgery is “a branch of surgery concerned with improving the function or appearance of parts of the body through reconstructive or cosmetic procedures.” Both serve a purpose — reconstructive surgery, in particular, is critical to recovery after some types of trauma — but critics of cosmetic procedures sometimes call out cases in which they think the patient ends up looking overly artificial. For this reason, many people assume the “plastic” in “plastic surgery” has something to do with synthetic polymers. In reality, the word “plastic” is derived from the 19th-century development of the medical field and the Greek language.

The Greek adjective plastikos means that something is “capable of being molded or shaped.” To the ancient Greeks, the word was widely used in relation to pottery and other handmade goods. In time, plastikos spawned the Latin plasticus, which then became the English term “plastic,” meaning “capable of shaping or molding a mass of matter,” around the 1630s — long before the material called plastic was developed.

Around the early 19th century, “plastic” spread to the surgical world. In 1818, a German surgeon named Karl Ferdinand von Graefe pioneered new techniques related to molding and reshaping noses. He published a study called Rhinoplastik — combining the prefix rhino-, meaning “nose,” and the Greek-inspired suffix -plastik. In the wake of publication there was a spike in other surgeons conceiving of and performing various “-plasties” that targeted other physical features.

With the emergence of so many similarly named reconstructive surgeries, it wasn’t long until the umbrella term “plastic surgery” emerged. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest known instance in an 1837 edition of the Lancet medical journal, which refers to the concept as “a branch of surgery in which alone the operating surgeon becomes a real artist.” In 1838, surgeon Eduard Zeis helped popularize the term in a textbook titled Handbuch der plastischen Chirurgie (Handbook of Plastic Surgery).

So you can see that in an etymological sense, plastic surgery is clearly derived from the Greek plastikos and not our modern understanding of plastic materials. Human-made plastics weren’t invented until the 1860s — several decades after “plastic surgery” was coined as a surgical term.