Mikamo's double-eyelid operation: the advent of Japanese aesthetic surgery. 1896.

The double-eyelid procedure used to create a second palpebral sulcus in the Asian eye is fundamental to modern Asian aesthetic surgery. M. Mikamo, a nineteenth-century Japanese physician, reported the first cases of the double-eyelid procedure for aesthetic purposes in 1896, a time of social transition and early Westernization in Japan. In this first English translation of Mikamo's original article, we reveal Mikamo's keen insight into Japanese women's new concerns with physical attractiveness and his purpose for developing an aesthetic eyelid procedure. Taken in the perspective of his time, Mikamo's operation represented a bold means to achieve beauty and an almost precocious attempt to make the Western practice of aesthetic surgery a recognized branch of Japanese medicine.