Leïla Slimani and Clément Oubrerie pay vibrant homage to the pioneering doctor and feminist Suzanne Noël.

SURGERY AS A SOCIAL AND FEMINIST BATTLEGROUND

Suzanne Noël as a high-flying medical student in the early days of plastic surgery and was to make a decisive contribution to the field’s development. Plastic surgery was considered risky and pointless by much of the medical profession at the time, but she saw it from a radically different point of view, as a tool for women’s liberation. As the cosmetics and fashion industry developed in France in the inter-war years, giving rise to new standards of beauty, Suzanne Noël understood that unattractive features, by birth or by accident, were a real handicap for women. She used surgical techniques to combat the signs of aging, poverty, disease, or sheer exhaustion.

AN ARTIST IN HER OWN FIELD

During the First World War, plastic surgeons developed new techniques to help facially disfigured soldiers, putting their specialty on a more respectable footing. Suzanne Noël operated alongside Professor Hippolyte Morestin on soldiers with shattered faces, developing revolutionary new surgical protocols. After the war, her work made her a household name worldwide. As a feminist who fought for female suffrage, she was a truly independent figure who did much to raise the profile of plastic surgery as a medical specialty in its own right.