[Image Source: Yiddish Forward, January 9th, 1915]
Translation:
A Crooked Or Bent Nose
The most beautiful face is very often corrupted by a crooked or bent nose, strange spots or psoriasis, wrinkles or pimples. If you suffer from one or more of these flaws and feel yourself assuredly unhappy and depressed, must you but suffer? No! The modern surgical science has all your worries and your troubles, too.
Dr. R. Newman will make your nose straight and beautiful, and he will help you in all other face troubles.
Dr. Newman is one of the greatest specialists in treating all kinds of diseases and flaws on the face and skin. A thousand sufferers were treated through his wonderful theories and he can help you for sure. Dr. Newman treats the following conditions with the greatest success and without pain or time lost: pimples, blackheads, freckles, psoriasis, and spots on the face, birthmarks, excessive hair on the face, wrinkles, skin tags, bent and collapsed noses, thinning hair, angled ears, under-eye bags, frown lines, or hair over the whole face removed, bringing back the young appearance from the younger years.
Moles and unusual bits on the face and head, forever cured.
Free medical examination.
From 10 in the morning to 8 in evenings. Sunday from 10 in morning to 8 in the afternoon.
Office Hours
Between 2nd and 3rd Ave., New York
Dr. Newman, 36 East 3rd St.
In terms of location, I cannot find any information on Dr. Newman or his East Village practice. The address listed now belongs to an apartment complex. However, the assimilationist theme of the advertisement points to an ongoing current of oppression the worldwide — the installation of self-hatred within oppressed groups. In this case, the advertisement opens with (and reiterates) the claim that Dr. Newman can adjust “corrupted” noses, a clear judgement on stereotypically Jewish facial features, especially given its language and placement in a Yiddish newspaper. The advertisement pushes the idea that to be beautiful is to conform to Western beauty standards. We see this theme exhibited cross-culturally to this day in practices such as billboards advertising skin-lightening creams throughout South Asia.
According to The Independent, the discovery of a scar-free rhinoplasty procedure fed into a mass movement among African Americans and Jewish immigrants to “pass” among those who were then understood to be “white.” Although this particular surgery was successful, the majority of other claims commonly made by self-proclaimed cosmetic surgeons were often unsupported. In fact, many of the “flaws” Dr. Newman advertises himself as being able to correct are the same ones that the since-disgraced Dr. Charles Conrad Miller wrote about his personal cures for. According to S. J. Perelman, Miller’s book (which can be found here, gory illustrations and all) features “instructions for correcting outstanding ears, which range all the way from tying them flat to the head to some pretty violent surgery.” The willingness of people to go under such dangerous surgeries to correct such minute “flaws” proves the urgency with which the matter of assimilation was — and continues to be — treated. Maybe the first step for people in American culture to learn self-acceptance is learning to identify fraudulent science.
