Pretty Does as Pretty Is?

Does an ugly face or a disfigured body help to mold an ugly character? From Homer on, poets and novelists have so contended. Some psychiatrists agree.

Last week a surgeon suggested that plastic surgery can reverse the process and make a bad man better. Dr. John F. Pick of Chicago has been testing this theory for eleven years by remolding the faces--and hence the characters, he hopes--of convicts at Illinois' Stateville Penitentiary. It does not always work, Dr. Pick reports. But he assured the International College of Surgeons in Chicago that of 376 convicts released after plastic surgery, less than 1% have since got into trouble (without surgery, 17% come back for parole violations).

Among Dr. Pick's patients: a man with a broken nose and mastiff jowls, who took to crime, he said, after his young son remarked: "Daddy, you look just like a bad man. Why don't you change your face?" Dr. Pick changed his face, and daddy is now a law-abiding delicatessen dealer.

A criminal whose personality has been twisted too long by physical deformity cannot be helped by surgery, says Dr. Pick: "The reform school is the place to begin. We could hope then to stop a criminal career right at the start."

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