This century has seen countless breakthroughs in medicine and surgery that would nearly seem miraculous to the generations before us. For a person born in 1910, who would’ve thought that in 100 years it’d be possible to remove fat from nearly anywhere in the body, reshape the nose, tighten skin in the abs, thighs, and elsewhere, add shape and firmness to the buttocks and breasts, remove unwanted breast development in men, suck fat out of the neck and back, whiten our teeth, remove hair from anywhere, make our lips fuller, our chins straighter, our eyes bigger, and so on and so forth! The human body has truly become something that a surgeon does indeed sculpt, hence our nomenclature of liposculpture surgery.
Obviously, many of these techniques are new or at least relatively new. How did they come about? Where did they come from? In this article, we’ll take a brief tour of history of liposculpture specifically.
In the 1920’s, a French physician by name of Dr. Charles Dujarrier removed excess fat from someone. Interestingly, it would appear that the first patient that had this type of surgery was a ballerina! She had fat removed from her calves and knees. The tool of choice was called a curette, which is a spoon like device used to scrape dirt and whatnot off the skin.
Sadly, the patients body did not receive the surgery well: something went wrong, and her leg had to be amputated – a terrible event for anyone, made all the more so worse for someone whose job was a ballerina.
Decades later in the 1960’s, surgeons began working again on similar procedures to remove fat from the body. These techniques were crude, involving removal of whole areas of skin and fat at once, leaving quite a scar on the body of the patient. This type of surgery was not widespread.
Halfway through the 1970’s, an American father-son team working in Rome invented what we call the cannula – the tube inserted into the patient which sucks fat out of the body. The Fischers invented this device and connected it to a suction tool to successfully remove fat from the patient. The methods used here came to known as dry liposculpture, and while wildly more successful than the work done before them, the procedure was not without it’s problems, creating roadblocks to it becoming a widespread surgery.
In the early 1980’s another French surgeon made history in the area of body sculpting by refining the previous “dry” technique and inventing wet liposculpture or wet liposuction. This technique involved the injection of saline into the area being treated, which reduced bleeding as well as made it easier to remove body fat through a cannula.
5 years later in 1987 an American physician by the name of Dr. Jeffrey Klein is credited with the invention of the tumescent liposculpture technique. This technique involved injecting the patient with solution of licodaine and epinephrine, which reduced blood loss during surgery, and made the swelling and pain experienced in recovery easier. Additionally, because licodaine was used as part of the solution, it allowed for a local anesthesia to be used during surgery instead of a general anesthesia, further making tumescent liposculpture safer and easier to implement than previous techniques.
Today, over 20 years later, there are various tools and techniques developed for liposculpture – such as smart liposuction, lippodissolve, and vibro liposculpture – yet the tumescent liposculpture technique remains the most widespread surgical technique for removing fat from the body.
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