Free Breasts by Florence Williams Page A

the carbonbased ingredients, Corning partnered with Dow Chemical in 1943 to form a new war-christened giant, Dow Corning, in the American heartland.
    When the war ended, Dow Corning was eager for new civilian markets for wartime products. The company began ardently filing patents for silicone polishes and paints, adhesives, silicone shoe rubber (astronaut Neil Armstrong would take a giant step in it in 1969), caulking, and other applications. The medical profession was intrigued by silicone’s strength, flexibility, and apparentnon-reactivity, and slowly the material made its way into catheters, stents, tubing, and blood bags.
    In American-occupied Japan, another, less orthodox use was found for silicone. Drums of the stuff, needed for cooling transformers, went missing from the docks of Yokohama harbor. It turned up in the breasts of Japanese prostitutes, who were being injected with it to better attract enlisted farm boys. The technique spread through eastern Asia and became one of Japan’s most popular exports to the United States. But as with paraffin, the industrial caulk-like material was known to migrate throughout the body, form hard lumps, and cause serious infections.
    Back in Houston, plastic surgeon Thomas Cronin was holding a new silicone bag of warm blood in St. Joseph Hospital. It was 1959, and the blood bags were a nice change from glass bottles. My, he thought, that feels good. That feels like a breast.
    The era of the boob job was about to arrive.

    AT FIRST GLANCE, THIS HARD CITY OF OIL DERRICKS, PIPELINES, and banks might seem an unlikely place for such a defining moment in the natural history of breasts. But in addition to its status as the oil and gas capital of the country, Houston in the 1950s was emerging as a major medical hub, in no small part because of the city’s oil and gas wealth. MD Anderson Cancer Center had been created in 1941 as part of the University of Texas system. Houston’s Texas Medical Center, including several nonprofit hospitals and schools, was well on its way to becoming the largest medical center in the world. At Baylor College of Medicine, where Cronin worked, a cardiologist named Michael DeBakey had just pioneered a procedurecalled patch-graft angioplasty with a Dacron swatch, a celebrated technique still used today. Plastics and chutzpah were revolutionizing medicine.
    Add to this a lively burlesque scene, the city’s embrace of petro-fueled commerce and technology, and its particular brand of cowboy entrepreneurialism, and Houston was perfect for the Future Boob mantle. Cronin was ambitious, and he’d been thinking about the breast for some time. He was aware of the practice of silicone injections and dismissed it as no good. But when he saw the new blood bags, he reasoned that if the filler substance could be contained in a sac, many of the collateral problems would be solved. He and his chief resident, Frank Gerow, found a receptive audience at Dow Corning. Working with the company, they designed an implant using a silicone rubber bag filled with silicone gel. On the back of the bag, they added several patches of Dacron in the hope that it would bind to the chest wall and keep the sac from ending up in an armpit. Accounts vary about how they tested it. Some authors say they tested it in six dogs, but Dr. Tom Biggs, who was another resident of Cronin’s at the time, told me they tested the implant in only one. She was, he recalled, a pound mutt named Esmerelda. When Esmerelda survived the surgery, the doctors called it good. (Esmerelda was not as delighted by her new profile, however. She soon chewed the implant out.)
    Next, they needed a human volunteer.

    IN 1962, TIMMIE JEAN LINDSEY WAS A TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD woman with a hard life behind her. After her mother died of cancer, she dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen, left home, and married a gas-station attendant. Six kids and twelve years later, shekicked him out for being a slouch and an alcoholic.