CHANGING THE FEATURES OF A NEGRESS.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 8, Issue 30, 12 April 1907, Page 2

CHANGING THE FEATURES OF A NEGRESS.

An extraordinary case of facial transformation has just taken place, viz., the practical transformation of a negro woman's face to that of a while woman. Everyone who reads this will remember the remarkable suit brought by the octogenarian, John J. Platt, of New York, against the negress, Hannah Elias, two years ago. to recover over £IOO,OOO he had given her. She gained the day.

She is now engaged in another law suit with a surgeon specialist, Dr. E. P. Robinson, who engaged to make her as much like a Caucasian, or white woman, as possible, and who says he performed his part of the contract.

Dr. Robinson first gave his attention to the African nose. Uroad and fat, with its low, squat bridge, it Hared at the nostrils as no Caucasian nose has over done, or will ever do. The beauty doctor took from its case a simple-looking instrument resembling a. needle used for hypodermic injection of morphine, only it was larger, and near the handle were two wide silver’adjusters that looked like butterfly wings that had been transformed to metal. He filed it with a colourless liquid of the consistency of gelatine and inserted it in the skin just above the tip of the woman’s nose.

The long needle reached from the tip to the point between the eyes, and Abe gelatinous substance filled the space intervening between the adaptable skin and the network of the muscles beneath. The skin, drawn at an unaccustomed tension to accommodate the foreign substance, was correspondingly drawn away from the broad nostrils, narrowing them, as had been promised, a matter of a quarter of an inch on either side. To reduce the African over-fullness of the lips was the next task. The special subcutaneous needle was inserted at the corner of the right lip and thrust its full length to the edge of the now abridged nostril. The gelatinous substance, made after the doctor's recipe, was injected, and the line disappeared, and that side of the face took on a curiously youthful appearance. So the corresponding line on the left, was eradicated.

Little tell-tale lines, running from the corners of the lips downwards, those which women call "the care lines,” he obliterated in the same, way. And while those etchings traced by time wore disappearing the shape of the nogress’s lips had undergone a transformation. HOW the LIPS WERE NARROWED.

As the skin was drawn up to accommodate itself to the effacing of the old linos and the covering of the injected substance, it was so stretches to draw the corners of the lips slightly upwards, and narrow, noticeably the upper lip. So also did the tension of the skin in the removal of the care lines diminish the lower lip. The ugly lines radiating from the outer corners of the eyes, the lines that poets designate the path of laughter and ordinary people call crows’ feet, were treated in the same manner. The hollows, sounding their note of depleted vitality, beneath the eyes, wore filled out by the same method of subcutaneous (under the skin) injection, and the heavy double chin was similarly removed..

Dr. Robinson administered four other treatments. For the city calls and treatments he charged his patient £lO each, and for the Long Branch visits and treatments £2O each. The fees aggregated £l2O, for which he sues. He states that the Elias enchantess was charmed with the magical transformation wrought in her features She was merely and femininely unreasonable because he could not give her a Caucasian complexion as well as the features of the whites. Dr. Robinson told Mrs. Elias at the beginning that facial pigment is a mysterious thing ; that we do not know why we have it and we must leave it, as it has been from the beginning a mystery. There has been many attempts to make black faces white, but they were, he tells us, a waste of time and mental energy that should have been devoted to a better cause. There has never been a successful experiment in changing the Ethiopian to the white skin. Nothing but disease, which soon kills the patient, has ewer achieved it. Nothing, he believes, ever will.