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October 23 in History

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A Face Carved from the Forehead

October 23, 1814

A Face Carved from the Forehead

In an era before anesthesia, a London surgeon picked up a scalpel to attempt an operation Western medicine had long dismissed as impossible. Could an ancient Indian technique truly rebuild a human face from a flap of living forehead skin?

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Also on this day

More that happened on October 23

Pick any event and Historai will make it an episode.

  1. 1086Almoravid forces commanded by Yusuf ibn Tashfin routed the army of King Alfonso VI of Castile at az-Zallaqah.
  2. 1641Irish Catholic gentry launched an uprising across Ulster, initiating more than a decade of devastating warfare in Ireland.
  3. 1707The first Parliament of Great Britain convened in Westminster following the union of the Scottish and English crowns.
  4. 1850Delegates gathered in Worcester, Massachusetts, to inaugurate the United States' first National Women's Rights Convention.
  5. 1944Allied and Japanese forces initiated the massive Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval clash of the global conflict.
  6. 1947Biochemists Gerty and Carl Cori shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine, becoming the first married couple honored jointly.
  7. 1954Western powers approved agreements in Paris that restored sovereignty to West Germany and authorized its entry into NATO.
  8. 1958The Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Russian author Boris Pasternak for his novel Doctor Zhivago.
  9. 1983Suicide truck bombers struck multinational peacekeeping barracks in Beirut, killing hundreds of American and French military personnel.
  10. 1989Hungarian leaders officially dissolved the communist People's Republic and proclaimed the establishment of a democratic parliamentary state.
  11. 2001Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod digital music player at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California.
  12. 2002Armed Chechen militants raided a theater in Moscow, seizing hundreds of audience members and performers as hostages.

Chosen from the October 23 pages of HISTORY, HistoryNet and OnThisDay.com, retold in our own words.