Dr. Elizabeth Comen

That is a word I only read in a book and never said out loud.

Do you know I think the smartest people can't pronounce anything?

I can't pronounce anything.

I think I'm pretty smart, so...

We can just go with it.

Yeah.

And we developed anesthesia.

So before that, you know, surgeons were not, before we had anesthesia, surgeons were called butchers.

They were just these like, you know, barbarians, right?

Who were, who could like cut off a limb as quickly as possible because there was no anesthesia.

There's no antibiotics.

People often died.

And then you develop this field where you have the rise of

the ability to operate on people without pain.

And oh my God, now you can operate on seemingly healthy people and modify them.

So you could fix the guy who had his face shot off on the battlefield, but you could also fix the ugly woman who could now become more marriage material.

And it's really kind of fascinating to see how that evolved.

And most plastic surgeons in the field were men initially.

And now, of course, we have many more female plastic surgeons, but that's not the way the field arose.

So there's a passage that you wrote that really struck me.