Free Breasts by Florence Williams

rare. Many more breast reductions were performed than breast augmentations. For much of Western history, large breasts were considered a burden and a handicap. Consider the case of poor Elisabeth Trevers, a young Englishwoman who, according to her surgeon, woke up one morning in 1669 “and attempted to turn herself in bed, [but] she was not able … Then endeavoring to sit up, the weight of the breasts fastened her to her bed; where she hath layn ever since.”
    Augmentation came later. Although inserting foreign objects into the body was known to be dangerous, there were always some surgeons and women willing to experiment. The first boob job is attributed to Vincenz Czerny, a Heidelberg physician. He transplanted a benign fatty growth from the backside of a forty-one-year-old singer to her chest in 1895. It was a good idea, since the material came from her own body and was less likely to cause animmune-system rejection, but the result was lumpy and, because the fat liquefied, temporary. That was failure number one.
    From that point on, the backstory of implants reads like a horror novel.
    In the early twentieth century, implant materials included glass balls, ivory, wood chips, peanut oil, honey, goat’s milk, and ox cartilage. What became of the (thankfully few) women who volunteered for these leaps of science? The parable of paraffin offers a glimpse. From the mid-nineteenth century, paraffin injections had been used on facial deformities. Sadly, there was plenty of opportunity; both war and syphilis—which depressed the nose—were great for advancing the art of plastic surgery. Inevitably, the wax was injected into the breast. But by 1920, its limitations were well known. It melted in the sun, for one. It also created lumps and tumors called paraffinomas that eventually had to be excised out, leaving scars. Beyond that, other problems were puss, hardness, blue skin, and feverish rheumatism. At least one woman’s infected breasts had to be amputated. As one historian put, the disadvantages of paraffin ranged from aesthetic failure to death.
    Of course, women going to dangerous extremes for beauty was hardly new. For a thousand years Chinese women crippled themselves and their daughters to have tiny, deformed feet. Western women literally suffocated while wearing corsets, some of which punctured their internal organs. Women have painted their faces with lead and arsenic and ripped their body hair off with hot wax. Oh, wait, we still do that.
    Into this sorry milieu came the plastics revolution and a new breed of unholy implant contenders: Teflon, nylon, and Plexiglas. Several surgeons were moved by the shape of plastic kitchen sponges.In 1957 a Johns Hopkins surgeon implanted a polyvinyl and polyethylene sponge (also made with “foaming agents” and formaldehyde) called the Ivalon into thirty-two women. As one magazine reported at the time, “The material’s one drawback is that when it dries inside the breast it becomes a hard lump.”
    Meanwhile, toiling in a laboratory in Midland, Michigan, chemists were experimenting with different uses for a versatile material called silicone. Corning Glass Works had begun fooling around with the stretchy composite in the 1930s, making it from silicon (an element) left over from its glass production. To this they added organic carbon-based chemicals in various configurations, resulting in a material that was pretty close to miraculous: hardy, inert, and heat resistant, yet soft and flexible. It was a glass-and-plastic hybrid, with the best properties of both. The company thought it might make a good mortar for its trendy glass bricks (they were wrong, but the failed formulation found new life two decades later as Silly Putty). At the beginning of World War II, U.S. Navy officials coveted a similar formulation of silicone, finding it perfect for insulating airplane ignitions (it made long flights to Europe possible) and for lubricating machinery. To guarantee larger supplies of