Medicine: Plastic Surgeon

The amateur plastic surgeon who altered the fingertips and features of the late John Dillinger is in prison for compounding that blackguard’s felonies. But the scare over what plastic surgery can do to mask a crook’s identity keeps mounting. Director John Edgar Hoover of the U. S. Bureau of Investigation writes severe letters to medical journals threatening to jail surgeons who aid crooks in this way. He puts squarely upon the shoulders of all plastic surgeons the burden of discovering whether or not their patients are law breakers. Perturbed, Commissioner Lewis Valentine of New York City’s police department last week summoned the president of the American Society of Oral & Plastic Surgeons, Dr. Joseph Eastman Sheehan, to tell the force what was possible.

Dr. Sheehan, a dapper man of 50, appeared with eight pairs of lifelike, flesh tinted, before-&-after models of faces which he had repaired, and two similar pairs of hands. He displayed colored lantern slides of dozens of before-&-after faces. Lastly he ran off a colored movie* of an operation to repair a young woman’s paralyzed features. The policemen grunted and whistled as they saw Dr. Sheehan inject novocaine and slice the conscious girl’s head from eyebrow to ear, nick a rent at the corner of her lips. The girl’s chest heaved as Dr. Sheehan’s hands pulled her scalp away from the underlying muscles. The hands pushed a blunt pair of scissors under the skin of the girl’s cheek, from the upper incision to the hole at her lips. There was very little bleeding.

Next the hands caught up thin flat muscles from the scalp, swung them around and under the loose cheek skin, anchored them at the girl’s lip. Quick stitches joined the open parts of the face. Before the operation, the patient had been unable to move a muscle of the left side of her face. Two weeks later, another picture showed, the girl could wink, smile, purse her lips.

Said Dr. Sheehan: “When a competent plastic surgeon performs this sort of an operation no scar remains which a photograph will reveal. Only a sharp eye can detect the line of the incision in vivo.”

The same, said he, is true for almost any plastic operation—removal of moles, repair of harelips, remodeling of noses, reconstruction of jaws, replacement of fingernails, destruction of scars, counterfeiting of fingertips. For fingertips he uses skin from the abdomen. “

In other words,” said he, “a competent plastic surgeon, if given time, can alter every mark by which human beings are ordinarily identified. The advantage which the police still have in dealing with criminals is that the criminal is always in a hurry. And this work, to be well done, takes time. . . .”

Police Commissioner Valentine: “Dr. Sheehan’s demonstration means that we must make over our system of identification completely.”

After his lecture to New York City’s police. Dr. Sheehan sped back to the Fifth Avenue Surgery of Dr. J. Eastman Sheehan, which envious doctors say is the world’s most gorgeous consultation establishment. There are two butlers, a general manager (Henry Osman), a secretary and blonde Hilda Krupp, the housekeeper who stands by all day so that at any moment the Doctor may have his whittled asparagus, hamburgers or sausages, toast, strawberry jam and tea. Hilda also presses his suits (25 at a time), rolls bandages, keeps everybody cheerful, including Henry who has most to do with the patients’ bills (up to $10,000 for an operation, $75 for a house call).

To get to the consultation salon on the second floor, the patient walks over thick pile turkey red carpets, passes paintings by Rubens and Van Dyck. In the consultation room are some of the mementos which make Dr. Sheehan, a lonely man, happy—Christmas cards from his good friends King Carol of Rumania, the Prince of Wales, Queen Mother Elisabeth of the Belgians, Alfonso of Spain; autographed photographs of Elisabeth, Alfonso, many a notable in government and medicine:* decorations from Belgium, France, Spain, Rumania. Fastened to red velvet and framed in gold is the “original key used by the ex-Emperor of Germany during his sojourn in France at the Hotel du Nord, Charleville. 1914-1918.”

In a side room are the ghastly models which Dr. Sheehan, dressed in a white surgeon’s gown with theatrical black lapels, makes of his patients before and after their operations. The models become especially useful when a patient welshes about the bill.

* Dr. Sheehan was the first surgeon to make colored movies of surgical operations.

* Wrote Lord Moynihan, onetime president of the Royal College of Surgeons, to Dr. Sheehan: “. . . How excellent a showman.”