[The history of plastic surgery (author's transl)].

The plastic surgery begins with rhinoplastic methods in the early medieval India and was unknown to Western medicine until 1400. The first European surgeon, who restored a lost nose, was Branca de'Branca in Sicily. He took the flap from the cheek, but his son Antonio Branca took the reparative flap from the upper arm, and this "Italian method" was first described by the knight of Teutonic Order Heinrich von Pfalzpaint in 1460. Antonio Branca repaired also mutilated lips and ears, and the methods employed by him and by the Vianeo family in Calabria are described by various authors, most extensively by Gaspare Tagliacozzi in his "Chirurgia Curtorum" (1597). -Soon after Tagliacozzi's death, plastic surgery fell into disuse, until in 1794 the description of a rhinoplastic operation in India brought the methods again to the attention of European surgeons and initiated the revival of the practice. German surgeons as Carl Ferdinand Graefe, Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach and Bernhard Langenbeck leaded it to its full modern development.