In Venus Envy, Elizabeth Haiken traces the quest for physical perfection through surgery from the turn of the century to the present. Drawing on a wide array of sources - personal accounts, medical records, popular magazines, medical journals, and beauty guides - Haiken reveals how our culture came to see cosmetic surgery as a panacea for both individual and societal problems.

As Americans and their surgeons linked the significance of "normal" standards of beauty to social adjustment and economic success, they also linked "undesirable" physical characteristics to psychological conditions such as the "inferiority complex," for which cosmetic surgery appeared to offer a sure cure.

Many Americans now view cosmetic surgery as the most practical solution for an ever-increasing number of perceived problems - from low self-esteem to stalled careers - and plastic surgery has become one of the largest and fastest growing medical specialties in the world.

But Haiken questions whether these "solutions" are not in some sense chimeras: by emphasizing the importance of appearance, cosmetic surgery raises serious concerns about how society views such intractable problems as aging, gender, and race - and about how Americans view themselves.