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TPCDHistory and present situationof Turkish Plastic Surgery50th Anniversary of the Turkish Societyof Plastic SurgeonsProf. Ibrahim Yıldırım MDPlastic, Reconstructive andAesthetic Surgery Department,Cerrahpaşa Medical Faculty,İstanbul University, İstanbul TurkeyIt is an interesting coincidence for me that this articleis written just on the 50th Anniversary of the TurkishSociety of Plastic Surgeons. The society was founded in1961.The history of Turkish Plastic Surgery goes back tothe 8th century. German scientists found 64 Turkishmanuscripts, dated 1902 – 1914 years ago, in theSincan region of “East Turkistan” (in present-day northwesternChina, where Uygur Turks live). These arethe oldest documents in Turkish and Turkish PlasticSurgery 1,2 ,written in three different alphabets: the Uygurversion of the Sogd alphabet, the Brahmi alphabetof Indian root and the Nestori/Suryani alphabet 1,2 .They are kept in the Brandenburg Academy of Sciencein Berlin and consist of mostly traditional medicaldocuments, dealing with subjects including nasal tumors,fascial palsy, head and neck tumors, skin lesions, woundhealing and other plastic surgical problems.At the beginning of the 13th century, the first TurkishMedical Book “Tuhfe-I Mübarizi” was written in Turkishby Hekim Bereket 8 .As it is known, the first University was founded in Istanbulin 1453, just after the conquest of the city by the OttomanTurkish Empire. Şerefeddin Efendi of Amasya 3,4,5,6 wasa pioneer in Turkish Plastic Surgery and he published asuperb and beautifully illustrated surgical book, named“Cerrahiyyetü-l Haniyye 3 in 1465, written in the Turkishlanguage. He described many different techniques andhe demonstrated these techniques with 140 diagramsin his two-volume book. Most of the cases were relatedto congenital problems and trauma. Additionally,gynecomastia, hermaphrodism, mandibular subluxation,and carcinoma of the lip, etc. were also described.In the 15th century, Mümin bin Mukbil 16 from Sinop,described techniques for the treatment of diseases andcoloured lesions on the eyelids and orbital region; inAll documents were read by Ord. Prof. Reşid RahmetiArat (Gabdul Raşid Rachmati Arat) in Berlin.Most of the Turkish physicians often used to work on morethan one subject and the languages of the scientific arenaat that time were Arabic and Persian 4 . One of them wasAviCenna 4 (Ibn-i Sina) (980 – 1037) from Harmaysan,near the Buhara; in his well-known book “Tıp Kanunu”(Law of the Medicine) he gave details about “Ectropionand Entropion” and the muscles of the eyelids.addition, blepharoplasty and special surgical instrumentsfor these procedures as well.After the “decline of the Ottoman Empire”, newunderstandings and modern establishments brought newhorizons to medicine. The first modern school of medicine 7was established in 1827 in Istanbul by Sultan Mahmud.The Second one was a military medical school 9,10 . In orderto be able to relate to the Western World, the teachinglanguage was converted to French, starting in1839 and,74 IPRAS Journal www.ipras.org Issue 7