2.9.10: Icy cold winds blowing | New York Social Diary

Icy cold winds blowing

An oil tanker and a towboat move through an ice-filled Hudson RIver. 8:00 PM. Photo: JH.

February 9, 2010. Yesterday was a sunny day in New York with icy cold winds blowing. I had lunch at Michael’s with a woman friend whom I’ve known for a long time. She’s an especially attractive woman and one of the few I know who hasn’t had some kind of plastic surgery. So she is not wrinkle-free, so to speak.

She told me yesterday that a long time ago when Botox was first being used, she had some injected. Shortly thereafter she ran into a friend on the street who asked her if she was in good health. Yes, was the answer, but she wanted to know “why” this person asked. “Because,” she was told, her face looked like she wasn’t in good health. That did it for her and she never went back.

I told her that I often get emails from readers, especially men, who ask me why all the women in our Party Pictures have plastic surgery. I don’t believe that’s so, incidentally – although I don’t know for sure and I’m no expert at determining. Nor can I answer that question: why ...? I take these messages to mean that most men aren’t impressed (if they can tell, that is). I told my friend this at lunch. She told me that all of her women friends are always urging her to do it.


	Dr. Gerald Imber with a copy of Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted. Click to order.

I’m going somewhere with this. Last night Judy Licht and Jerry della Femina had a book party at their Upper East Side townhouse for their friend Dr. Gerald Imber, who is considered one of the top three plastic surgeons in New York. That ranking is one I hear bandied about although I’m not sure how it’s determined. However, I’ve interviewed Gerry Imber a couple of times over the years and found his thoughts about cosmetic surgery to be very interesting.

I know that he got into his line of work because when he was a young resident working in a hospital in California, one day in surgery (not cosmetic), the doctor he was working under asked him if he’d ever considered the field and advised him to look into it because he had “very talented hands.” Because he respected this particular doctor, he took his advice, followed through, and a distinguished medical career was born.

When I learned that he’d written a book, I assumed that it had something to do with cosmetic surgery. I was wrong. The book is titled Genius On the Edge; The Bizarre double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted.

Dr. Halsted, who was born in 1852, was one of the early staff member of Johns Hopkins Hospital (which had been planned with a grant from Mr. Johns Hopkins in 1873 but did not open until 1889, with the medical school coming four years later in 1893).

Dr. Halsted was a most interesting man, brilliant, and a medical hero. In 1882, at age 30, he performed surgery (on a kitchen table) on a jaundiced 70-year-old woman, having determined that she had an infection of the gallbladder and gallstones. The emergency surgery was successful – the first known operation to remove gallstones – and his mother’s life was saved.


Dr. William Stewart Halsted, age 28.

When he was 32, following the experiments of Sigmund Freud with an exciting new drug, Cocaine alkaloid, and its possibilities as an anesthetic, he learned to produce a reliable dental anesthesia and performed minor surgeries using cocaine as a local anesthesia. He also tried morphine, then used to relieve anxiety, nervousness and sleeplessness and as an antidote to alcoholism. These experiments also left him addicted to both drugs. When he was 34 (1886) he was invited to work at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore and he was soon named Chief of Surgery.

At Johns Hopkins Dr. Halsted instituted the first residency training program for surgeons, He was the first to use rubber gloves and pioneered aseptic surgery. He devised the first successful hernia repair and was the first doctor to perform a radical mastectomy. He also was mentor to one of his residents, Dr. Harvey Cushing, the father of American neurosurgery (and father of Babe Paley, Minnie, the second Mrs. Vincent Astor, and Betsey, who was married to James Roosevelt and then John Hay Whitney, and grandfather of New York’s Amanda Burden).

And, Dr. Halsted remained addicted to cocaine and morphine for the rest of his life (he died in 1922 at age 70) while maintaining a distinguished medical practice.

Gerry Imber, in this medical biography shows how Dr. Halsted in a time when sanitary practices were virtually unknown pioneered scrub suits and sterile rubber gloves in his operating room, made local and spinal anesthesia a reality, and was a pioneering vascular surgeon and endocrine surgeon.

John Singer Sargent's The Four Doctors (1906), Drs. William H. Welch, William Stewert Halsted, William Osler, and Howard Atwood Kelly.

“... Forbidding and nurturing; rigid, proper, and secretive; compulsive and negligent, stimulating and reclusive, addicted and abstemious, oblivious and solicitous .... If a single person can be considered the father of modern surgery, the only contender is William Stewart Halsted,” a man who was driven by both humanitarian and self-destructive instincts and left a remarkable legacy.

All this from going to a book party for what I imagined would be a book on cosmetic surgery. Never assume.

The guests last night at the Imber book party at Judy Licht and Jerry della Femina's townhouse.

Last night I was telling Gerry Imber about my luncheon conversation with my friend and her thoughts on plastic surgery, and how so many male readers especially – comment on the situation. He nodded in agreement. Since he is known as a prominent plastic surgeon I asked him what his opinion was.

He told me that he had rules. First of all, he performs all his own surgeries. Second of all, he thinks “wrinkle-free” is in “bad taste for both the doctor and the patient.” He said the result of his work should leave the patient looking natural, looked “rested” and looking like themselves, but not like somebody different -- not like a mask (my words, not Dr. Imber’s).

The entrance foyer.

Barbara Goldsmith and Nina Griscom.

Judy Licht and Susan Mercandati.

Alexandra Penney, Linda Fargo, and Dennis Ashbaugh.

Lorna Graev, Debbie Bancroft, and Nancy Silverman.

Amy Fine Collins.

Marge Federbush and Marlene Hess.

Dr. Imber signs a copy for Michael McCarty.

Sandi Mendelson and David Kass.

James Reginato.

Around the town. Jill Lynne covered Deborah Turbeville’s “Past Imperfect: Works on Paper from a Book," which opened at Soho’s Staley-Wise Gallery for NYSD:

As an Artist/Photographer I am at times hypercritical about the work of others. However Deborah Turbeville’s imagery has been the subject of my admiration sine the 1970s.

Turbeville has succeeded in fusing fashion studies into a dynamic groundbreaking aesthetic. This show recalls her past work, with studies of models in seemingly happenstance environments as well as a casual Diana Vreeland – whom I’ve also photographed, processing with the first computer programming (my portrait of DV was hung in her Metropolitan Museum office.)

Deborah Turbeville with images from the “Past Imperfect: Works on Paper from a Book."

Diana Vreeland by Deborah Turbeville.

My favorite images of Turbeville’s have always been those outstanding pre-restoration crumbling Versailles – haunted interiors into which one can easily project themselves, returning to the fabulousness of its past.

Tacked on the wall with pushpins and brown paper, seemingly hastily inscribed with text, this curiously self-conscious “casualness,” actually creates the sensibility of a multi-dimensional art-installation. Staley-Wise, founded and directed by directed by Takouly Wise and Etheleen Staley, is one of New York’s and the world’s premiere Photography Galleries, just mounted this intriguing exhibition, which will be on view through March 20th.

— Jill Lynne
www.jilllynne.com