Jacques Joseph

Jacques Joseph, born Jakob Lewin Joseph in 1865, was a German physician remembered as a pioneer of rhinoplasty and of aesthetic plastic surgery. Berliners called him Nose Joseph. He was the third child of Rabbi Israel Joseph and his wife Sara, studied medicine at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin from 1885 to 1889 and joined the staff of the university clinic for orthopaedic surgery in 1892. In 1904 he published his first report on correcting a hump nose together with the front of the nasal septum from inside the nose. In 1916 the Prussian ministry of education and culture appointed him head of a new department of facial plastic surgery at the ear, nose and throat clinic of the Charité, and in 1919 he became a professor and received the Iron Cross. He opened his own practice in 1922 and in 1931 published his illustrated textbook on nasal plastic surgery, a book called a milestone of the field. He held that cosmetic surgery, though not a physical necessity, was worth its risks because of its benefit to a person's spirit, personality and place in the world. He died of a heart attack at his Berlin home in 1934.