He was born in Riga as the son of a civil servant Carl Szymanowski and his wife Helene, maiden name Kutzky.

[4] As a junior high school student, he manifested many talents and interests, took up painting and poetry, and founded a volunteer fire department with his schoolmates.

[5] From 1850 he studied medicine at University of Dorpat; his teacher of surgery was Georg Adelmann, and under his influence he decided to specialize in this field.

In the fall of 1866 he wrote to his teacher Adelmann asking for a consultation, but the latter, having set out for Kiev, fell ill on the way and had to turn back to Dorpat.

The eyelid lift correction operation introduced by Szymanowski, modified by Hermann Kuhnt, was called the Kuhnt-Szymanowski method.

In it, he made an almost complete review of the 225 nasal reconstructions described in the medical literature and the techniques used by his predecessors - Branka, Bojani, Tagliacozzi, Lucas, Rust, von Graefe, Carpue, Reiner, Bünger, Dieffenbach, Pirogov, Mütter, Pancoast and Adelmann.

In 1857, he also published his first article on plastic surgery in Prague's Vierteljahrschrift für die praktische Heilkunde; in it, he proposed minor modifications to rhinoplasty and cheiloplasty procedures.

Another area of Szymanowski's interest was desmurgy [pl], to which he devoted a small atlas published in 1857 in Dorpat[12] and a year later in Reval.

[15] His work also included case reports and observations from many other surgical departments: inguinal hernias, genital abnormalities in infertile married couples,[16] and the technique and complications of tracheotomy.