Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/265

 still pliable enough to be stretched. When it refuses these gentle means, it must be attacked with the surgeon's knife. It is true that it is often one of the most delicate and difficult operations in surgery to remedy these contractions, but with great patience among all concerned, it can generally be successfully carried through, and the parts, though never equal to what they might have been, will no longer be frightful or disgusting in appearance. Thus, an eyelid permanently drawn down, a chin fastened to the neck, two fingers grown together, or an ear pulled out of position, may be very much amended.

Thanks to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who introduced inoculation from Turkey, and to Dr. Jenner, who discovered vaccination, it is a rare sight now-a-days to see any one in the higher walks of life pitted by the smallpox. In former times, it used to be the terror of life to every one who had a pretty face, for there was no means known to prevent it leaving its hideous traces, even if life itself was not lost. Now, we can but rarely entirely do away with, or conceal the pits it digs, but very much may be done to prevent the attack, and in those rare instances where that fails to protect the individuals the scarring can be almost wholly avoided by timely local applications. So that not only in a medical but in a cosmetic point of view, our century has here won a manifest victory.

Even those faces which are pitted by the disease can