Cosmetics

Looking Back : Cosmetic surgery in 1675

Ambeth Ocampo aocampo@ateneo.edu
Inquirer News Service

EXAMINING our restaurant bill on a night out with friends, I noticed that the orders of food and drink came with short descriptions of people. I looked around our table and realized that it was the way our waiter remembered who ordered what.

This would not have been a problem if he merely described the color or print of our clothes, but one description said "pat girl" (i.e., fat girl). Restraining my laughter drew attention to the bill. One of the two "healthy" women in the group grabbed the bill, called the waiter and demanded to know who the "pat girl" was. To our horror, the waiter calmly pointed at our friend just as he would pick out a criminal from a police lineup.

This humiliating experience called for another round of drinks and laughs. When we finally asked to settle the bill an hour later, we checked the order form and noticed that the waiter had become more discreet: he just wrote "Pat."

I have grown 50 pounds heavier since that dinner and would probably be listed on the order form today as "pat boy," so I pay attention to ads for Xenical, herbal slimming tea and gym packages. On the Edsa highway, I gaze at Kris Aquino endorsing the Belo medical clinic and wonder when I will be man or vain enough to endure the post-operative pain and the hole in my pocket just to be thinner and sexier. Bench billboards with those beautifully sculpted gods and goddesses in their underwear move me to enjoy life with "lechon" [roasted pig], "chicharon bulaklak" [crisp fried pork intestines] and, of course, "chicharon" with "laman" [meat]. Why bother?

Decades ago, society gossips would always wait for Elvira Manahan to emerge from her annual Holy Week "retreat" beautiful as ever. This had nothing to do with penance and spiritual renewal; she checked in at the Makati Medical Center and had a makeover. Once I asked her why she endured liposuction, teasing her on her vanity. She replied, "It's not vanity, 'hijo' [son]. I'm only removing what [fat] shouldn't be there in the first place." She insisted that fat, once removed, would never grow back again, that diet and exercise were not required. Now that was real incentive.

Today doctors will tell you that nothing works better than regular exercise, a balanced diet and a healthy stress-free lifestyle. How do all these fit into history? Well, one of the obscure stories hidden in the 55-volume compilation of documents known as "Blair and Robertson" is a case of drastic cosmetic surgery, actually a lypectomy, performed on the Spanish Governor General Don Manuel de Leon in 1675. An excerpt from the Augustinian Casimiro Diaz's "Conquistas" reads:

"At this time in the year 1675, Governor Don Manuel de Leon was in great danger of dying, on account of having placed himself under medical treatment, without being actually sick, solely for the sake of improving his health… Don Manuel was a corpulent man and had grown so fleshy that he was almost unable to move about without aid, at which he grieved much because he could not attend to many functions which belonged to the obligations of his office. In view of this hindrance and his desires, Juan Ventura Sarra bound himself to cure Don Manuel and remove from him that great encumbrance [of flesh] -- confident because he was a very expert surgeon, and the governor a man of great courage and reared in and accustomed to the perils of war.

"The governor accordingly accepted this treatment; and the skillful surgeon opened his abdomen in many places and removed from him many lumps of fat, and then sewed up and treated the wounds. In a few weeks, the governor became well, and his flesh was much reduced, to the wonder of those who saw how the surgeon cut the flesh from his body, and the courage which the governor displayed…"

Anaesthetic was not readily available at the time, and the governor, a veteran of many battles where he was called "Iron Head," submitted to the painful ordeal armed only with his bravery (or should I say stupidity?) because he was almost 70 years old at the time.

While he survived the operation, he still grew fat and that led to some of the wounds reopening. While attending the funeral of Doña Maria Cuellar in Sto. Domingo Church, he started to bleed, but nobody noticed because he was in mourning clothes, and his chair and cushion were black. After a while he swooned and fell into the chair. He was attended to and was made to rest outside Intramuros, in one of the country estates by the Pasig River where he died in his sleep on April 8, 1676.

Another cause of death was proposed by the historian De la Concepcion who wrote in his "History of the Philippines":

"Governor Don Manuel de Leon was sick from excessive corpulency; and Don Juan de Sarra treated him by making cruel cuts in the flesh of his body.

"He attended, when these incisions were not yet quite healed, the funeral of Doña Maria de Cullar … and in the church the vapors which exhale from buried corpses -- which, experience proves, cost those so dear, who enter the church with sores or wounds, as those are poisoned and corrupted by those vapors—had the effect on the governor of opening his wounds and bringing on a hemorrhage which exhausted him … [and he died, April 11, 1667]."

Then as now, you are not covered by insurance for cosmetic surgery. Then as now, people will risk life and limb to look better.