Jack H. Sheen, MD
Jack Sheen turned rhinoplasty from an operation about removal into an operation about replacement: his 1984 spreader graft rebuilt the roof of the middle vault that hump removal had taken away, and his tip grafts put shape back where excision had flattened it. He worked through the nostrils, wrote the book the field taught from for a decade, and argued the closed case against Jack Gunter until both of them were printed opposite each other in 1997.
What he changed
Three things that were different in rhinoplasty afterwards.
He named the deformity his own era was producing
The classic reduction rhinoplasty of the 1960s and 1970s took the hump off, and a proportion of those noses collapsed inward at the middle vault, pinched at the tip, or filled in above the tip as scar replaced the structure that had been removed. Sheen's 1975 paper on secondary rhinoplasty is a catalogue of what removal costs, written while the field was still celebrating how much it could remove. The correction he proposed was not a better excision. It was to put cartilage back.
Rests on: Sheen, Plast Reconstr Surg 1975 (PMID 1144554).
The spreader graft, 1984
Two strips of cartilage set between the septum and the upper lateral cartilages, rebuilding the roof of the middle vault after a hump has been taken down. It is now used in primary operations to prevent the collapse rather than to repair it, and it is the ancestor of the autospreader and of the argument that the dorsum should not be cut apart at all, the preservation case. Forty years on it is still one of the most-used named grafts in the literature; what has been published about it since is in dorsum and hump and preservation.
Rests on: Sheen, Plast Reconstr Surg 1984;73:230–239 (PMID 6695022).
Grafting the tip, and then auditing it for twenty years
Sheen showed dorsal and tip grafting for the supratip deformity at the 1975 Millard symposium, and in 1993 published a twenty-year retrospective of the tip graft, an unusual thing for a surgeon of that era to do, since it meant publishing the cases that had not held. His 2000 paper set out seven milestones in his own practice, including where he had been wrong. Tip grafting is now one column of a much larger structural literature: what the trials say about tip support is in nasal tip.
Rests on: Sheen, PRS 1993 (PMID 8416539) · Sheen, PRS 2000 (PMID 10809116).
The record
| Date | What is documented | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1925 | Born 2 April, Santa Barbara, California | Secondary biography; PRS obituary title "1925 to 2021" |
| 1951–55 | Stanford AB, then Stanford MD | Secondary biography |
| 1955–64 | Residency, Cook County Hospital, Chicago; plastic surgery training completed 1964 | Secondary biography |
| 1975 | "Secondary rhinoplasty", PRS; dorsal and tip grafts shown at the Millard symposium | PMID 1144554 |
| 1978 | Aesthetic Rhinoplasty, with Anitra Peebles Sheen (C.V. Mosby); second edition 1987 | Secondary biography |
| 1981 / 1988 | Associate Clinical Professor, UCLA; Clinical Professor, USC | Secondary biography |
| 1984 | The spreader graft, PRS 73:230–239 | PMID 6695022 |
| 1993 | "Tip graft: a 20-year retrospective" | PMID 8416539 |
| 1997 | First president of The Rhinoplasty Society; presided at its first meeting, May 1997 | therhinoplastysociety.org |
| 1997 | "Closed versus open rhinoplasty — and the debate goes on", printed opposite Gunter | PMID 9047208 |
| 2000 | "Rhinoplasty: personal evolution and milestones" | PMID 10809116 |
| 2012 | Rhinoplasty Society Lifetime Achievement Award | therhinoplastysociety.org |
| 2021 | Died 19 April, Santa Barbara, aged 96 | PRS obituary title; secondary biography |
What is disputed
- Much of the biography above (birth date, degrees, appointments, the book's editions) rests on a secondary encyclopaedia entry, because the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery obituary is paywalled and the newspaper obituary is not retrievable. The publications and the society roles are primary.
- A widely repeated account of his teaching (four rhinoplasties a day, four days a week, with visiting surgeons watching) comes from a search snippet of the Los Angeles Times obituary and is not used on this page until the obituary itself is read.
- Priority for the spreader graft is Sheen's in the literature; the underlying observation that hump removal destabilises the middle vault was made repeatedly before him, and the preservation argument now claims that not removing the roof is the better answer to the same problem.
The papers this rests on
- Sheen JH. Secondary rhinoplasty. Plast Reconstr Surg 1975;56:137–145. PMID 1144554
- Sheen JH. Spreader graft: a method of reconstructing the roof of the middle nasal vault following rhinoplasty. Plast Reconstr Surg 1984;73:230–239. PMID 6695022
- Constantian MB, Ehrenpreis C, Sheen JH. The expert teaching system: a new method for learning rhinoplasty using interactive computer graphics. Plast Reconstr Surg 1987. PMID 3809276
- Sheen JH. Tip graft: a 20-year retrospective. Plast Reconstr Surg 1993;91:48–63. PMID 8416539
- Sheen JH. Closed versus open rhinoplasty, and the debate goes on. Plast Reconstr Surg 1997. PMID 9047208
- Sheen JH. Rhinoplasty: personal evolution and milestones. Plast Reconstr Surg 2000. PMID 10809116
Written by rhinoplasty.cc from the sources linked above, 2026-09-09.