DOCTOR PYGMALION

In as smooth a job of writing you could ask for, a plastic surgeon, who practices from a New York City penthouse, presents an autobiography that is an autopsy on a past that had its share of antiseptic gore as well as new techniques, of pretty payments as well as humanitarianism. He takes the reader really over the bumps of emotional impact before, during and after many of his operations. As a young interne in the 20's, Maltz delivered a baby with a hare lip and then and there, his decision was made. He would overcome the financial difficulties of his Lower East Side background and go to study plastic surgery in Berlin. He did so, under such names as Jacques Joseph and von Eiken- and while there lost his heart to a girl named Sylvia who didn't lose hers to him. Back home, his reputation and practice was slowly built up, and we are taken into the surgical intricacies and personal case histories of many a grafting and transplantation so skillfully that his account often reads like a thriller. There is the Italian contessa who wanted a face like her horribly burned husband's. A dip into history tells the famed case of Tagliacozzi who operated in the 16th century on Count Marlieux to give him a new nose (without anaesthetics). There are also the countless excellent jobs Maltz did to give his patients their right to look human. Here then is ""one man's meat""- cut out honestly and forthrightly- but which may appeal to more ladies than libraries.