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Although the physicians at Premier Plastic Surgery of Kansas City are trained in the latest cosmetic surgical techniques, they are but the latest heirs of a medical traditional that goes back much further than most patients realize.

The First World War was the first to be fought with products of the Industrial Age. Among the horrors wrought by those products were disfiguring injuries that surgeons had never seen nor even imagined in their worst nightmares.

Walter Yeo was a gunner aboard the HMS Warspite in 1916 when warships of Germany and Great Britain clashed off the coast of Denmark in that conflict's only serious naval battle. In the course of the action, Yeo suffered horrible facial burns that cost him his upper and lower eyelids. The following year, Yeo was treated at Queen Mary's Hospital, where his eyelids were reconstructed using a new procedure known at the time as tubed pedical - an early form of skin grafting pioneered by Dr. Sir Harold Gillies, known today as the “Father of Modern Plastic Surgery.”

However, the basis of the types of procedures performed by the physicians at Premier Plastic Surgery of Kansas City goes back much further than that. In fact, treatises on plastic surgery were written down by the Hindu surgeon Sashruta 2600 years ago, and date back at least 1400 years prior to that. Ancient Roman surgeons were known to do some simple procedures, such as repair of injured ears and noses. Such early surgery before the days of anesthesia and antiseptic procedures was both painful and dangerous however, and did not become commonplace until the 19th Century. The earliest plastic surgery techniques involving skin grafts – taking healthy skin from one part of the body for use on an injured area – date from the 1790s.

Patients who come to Premier Plastic Surgery of Kansas City are the beneficiaries of the thorough training that our surgeons have undergone in procedures that have come a long, long way in 6,000 years. In addition to autografts (skin taken from the patient him/herself), skin replacement can be taken from donors and even synthesized from a mixture of silicone and organic biological compounds.

However, as Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Surgeons at Premier Plastic Surgery of Kansas City are thoroughly trained in the latest medical techniques – which are the end products of six millennia of research and experimentation on the part of curious minds.