BUILDING A NEW FACE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 503, 4 November 1909, Page 4

BUILDING A NEW FACE.

SURGEON’S SENSATIONAL FEAT.

To buiid a new face has been successfully accomplished iu Boston, Mass., and according to reports published from America, the new art will open up a career for skilled practitioners, who will displace the tawdy advertising quacks known as beauty doctors.

Stephen Calabro (25 years old) is said to nave been discharged from the Mass, General Hospital literally with new features and scalp, following a series of operations among the most remarkable in surgical history, and extending over a period of three years, and done as a work of scientific interest by Dr Charles Porter of the Harvard Medical School. Calabro, was horribly burned, and was thought to be disfigured for life in an explosion in 1905, submitted himself for treatment iu March, 1906. The face, neck, scalp and arms were one mass of turtle-like skin, known to the medical profession as chelyoid tissue. He has now left the hospital with a new forehead, new eyelids, new cheeks, a new nose, a new chiu, a new neck and finally a new head of hair.

Calabro was given ether thirty times. The operation consisted of skin transportation and grafting. Much of the skin was taken from other paits of Calabro’s body, but his brother Thomas and other members of the family sacrificed portions to aid their brother. One of the greatest difficulties met with in the treatmeut of Caiabro was making a new head ot hair. Nearly the entire scalp had to be replaced, but this was finally accomplished, and uow the young man has a prolific crop of hair as good as new, which comes well down over his forehead. He has returned to his brother’s home in Quincy, where he has a little farm. He intends, he says, to raise fancy poultry for the market, and if this fails he can always make a good livelihood here by public* exhibition