Load-Bearing: How Capital Underwrote the Modern Body

Every nose job, every reconstruction, every silicone implant and lunchtime injectable has a price — and the price was never an accident.For a century, the story of plastic surgery has been told as a story of vanity, or of medical heroics. It is neither. It is a story about money.In Load-Bearing, board-certified plastic surgeon Atanu Biswas traces how financial forces — world wars, the Great Depression, tax policy, insurance law, consumer credit, reality television, and the private equity now buying up the field — shaped the modern human body, one economic incentive at a time. From the ruined faces of the First World War that built reconstructive surgery, to the GI Bill that funded a generation of surgeons, to the recession that exposed how a $12,000 procedure is really priced, this is the hidden financial machinery beneath a century of cutting.It is also a surgeon's reckoning with his own profession: who is qualified to hold the knife, what separates medicine from marketing, and why the most important question a patient can ask has nothing to do with price.Rigorous, surprising, and told with the clarity of a working operating room, Load-Bearing is the economic history of the body you didn't know you were living in.For readers of The Psychology of Money, Killer Looks, and anyone who has ever wondered what their face is worth.