An ad for the silicone injections performed on sex trafficked Japanese women. Despite infections & deaths, it says, "No harmful effects have been reported".
It was spring 1962 when Timmie Jean Lindsey, a mother-of-six, lay down on the operating table at Jefferson Davis hospital in Houston, Texas, to undergo the world’s first silicone breast implant surgery. Lindsey had visited the hospital seeking a tattoo removal and inquiring about having her ears pinned back, but accepted an offer for a free experimental breast enlargement surgery proposed to her by surgeons Frank Gerow and Thomas Cronin.
The idea for the silicone implant came to Gerow after groping a bag of blood. According to Teresa Riordan, author of Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations that have Made Us Beautiful, “Frank Gerow squeezed a plastic blood bag and remarked how much it felt like a woman’s breast. And he had this ‘Aha!’ moment, where he first conceived of the silicone breast implant.”
The clinical trial for this novel form of surgery was nearly non-existent and consisted of research conducted on just one female dog. The surgeons implanted the silicone bag into Esmeralda’s body and waited “a couple of weeks.” When she did not die, Gerow pronounced the implant “as harmless as water.”
“A rocket achieves lift off with lift and thrust - same thing in breast augmentation,” said Thomas Biggs, who was working with Gerow and Cronin in 1962 as a junior resident in plastic surgery.
“I was in charge of the dog. The implant was inserted under the skin and left for a couple of weeks, until she chewed at her stitches and it had to be removed.”
Though Gerow and Cronin are credited with inventing the silicone breast implant, they were not the first men to experiment on women’s bodies with silicone, and far from the first men to mutilate women’s breasts for the sake of male sexual arousal.
Since the 1890’s, men were injecting women’s breasts with foreign materials.
Surgeon Vincenz Czerny was behind the first documented breast augmentation surgery, which took place in Germany in 1895.
According to Florence Williams, writing for The Guardian,
“As early as 1899, men were injecting women's breasts with paraffin wax to make them bigger. It didn't work out so well. For one thing, the wax was known to melt in the sun. For another, it caused infections and lumps called paraffinomas. The subsequent story of implant materials reads like a twisted horror show: glass balls, ribbons, ox cartilage, wood chips, kitchen sponges.
During the American occupation of Japan after the second world war, drums of industrial silicone went missing from Yokohama harbour. It turns out someone got the clever idea to inject the coolant into the breasts of Japanese prostitutes so they would be more popular with American servicemen. That concept crossed the ocean to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Alarmed by the resulting infections, deformities and in some instances death caused by migrating silicone, US authorities prohibited the practice in 1965.”
The first silicone breast implants were performed on Japanese women trafficked into sex slavery during post-WWII American occupation. The silicone, stolen from shipping docks, was injected directly into their breasts, resulting in gangrene or “silicone rot”, and in some cases, death.
According to Susan Zimmermann, author of Silicone Survivors: Women’s Experiences with Breast Implants,
“Even though silicone was created in the United States, its use in breast injections did not originate here. That application began in Japan shortly after WWII, when American forces still occupied the country. Because American servicemen had a reputation for preferring women with breasts larger than those of most Japanese women, Japanese cosmetologists began experimenting with various substances and procedures to enlarge the breasts of Japanese prostitutes. Initially, this was accomplished by directly injecting substances such as goats’ milk and mixtures of paraffin and petroleum jelly into women’s breasts. Later, cosmetologists began using liquid silicone. Migration of the liquid could be prevented by adding olive or cottonseed oil, which would cause immediate scarring and thus encapsulate the silicone at the site of injection.
Dr. Sakurai was the first to use silicone injections in Japan and, shortly thereafter, introduced his technique to the United States, opening up a practice in California, where breast injections (later to be known as ‘Sakurai formula’) became especially popular. By 1965, more than 75 plastic surgeons in Los Angeles alone were injecting women’s breasts with silicone.
While Sakurai had familiarized the medical community with silicone injections, Carol Doda was probably the individual who introduced the general public to this procedure. Doda was a topless dancer at the Condor Club in San Francisco in the 1960’s; she attracted widespread media attention after she had her own breasts enhanced with silicone injections. Immediately, she went from ‘a rather ordinary go-go dancer with a 36-inch bust to a 44-inch topless superstar.’
Stripper Carol Doda became famous after a cosmetic surgeon injected her breasts directly with liquid silicone.
Subsequently, the practice of breast injections became popular in other states such as Nevada and Texas where nightclubs commonly used topless dancing and hired busty women to lure in customers. An estimated 50,000 American women have had their breasts injected with liquid silicone since the 1940’s, when the procedure was first introduced to the United States.
Even though silicone was believed to be a biologically inert and non-reactive substance, women who had undergone breast injections experienced many serious complications. For instance, some experienced ulceration, scarring, and swelling around their breasts. Others suffered from gangrene, infections, and collapsed lungs. Yet another problem resulted from the migration of silicone to various parts of women’s bodies. Although injections were often altered with oil that was intended to cause scarring to prevent migration, masses of silicone occasionally made their way to others parts of women’s bodies. Sometimes these masses could be removed successfully. However, more frequently, physicians were unable to excise the large quantities of the gel without disfiguring women. At least four deaths have been attributed to silicone injections. In one of these cases, silicone had migrated to a woman’s lungs, causing her to suffocate.”
Carol Doda died of kidney failure at the age of 78. Research published in 2017 identifies silicone injections as a catalyst for kidney failure and describes the case of a 31-year-old woman who developed kidney failure after 6 years of silicone injections: “Silicone, once thought to be safe for cosmetic use because of its thermal stability, now has been described as a catalyst to end-organ toxicity and multi-organ dysfunction.”
Public Health Service Publication, Issue 1950, "Maxillofacial Prosthetics", September 1966, describes the silicone injections of Dr. Sakurai and a man identified only as “Franke” who brought the practice to the United States
Thus what began in Japan as an experiment on sex trafficked women, who were treated as little more than objects for men’s sexual consumption, spread to showgirls and strippers of the United States. The full scope of the harm that silicone injections inflicted on women’s health will never be truly understood, since sex trafficked women are treated as disposable, and no comprehensive records on their physical condition exist.
Moreover, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) condoned this medical abuse. In 1965, the Dow Corning Center to Aid Medical Research received permission from the FDA to pursue liquid silicone studies in animals and humans. Unknown numbers of women were experimented on by US doctors, without their knowledge or permission, and their records were never submitted to the FDA.
A 1967 article in the Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, whose lead author was Dr. Franklin Ashley, describes what happened when liquid silicone was injected into the breasts of monkeys: in 13 of the animals, silicone injections caused “marked fibrous response” and “destruction of local anatomy.”
In the same article, Ashley says “a selected group of women” were repeatedly injected with 5 to 10 milliliters of liquid silicone into the breasts. Dr. Norman Anderson, a Johns Hopkins Hospital surgeon who chaired the FDA’s breast implant advisory panels in 1983 and 1988, discovered that the results of experimental silicone injections administered to an estimated 20,000 - 40,000 women were never published or reported to the FDA.
Following this, the FDA put an end to the license to experiment on women and revoked its permission to Dow. But in 1969, the FDA once again allowed Dow to test liquid silicone — provided it was not injected directly into women's breasts. Therefore, plastic surgeons began injecting silicone directly into women’s faces, instead.
“Dow then began its first large study of silicone injections for soft tissue defects, including facial wrinkles and scars in 1,337 patients, according to Anderson's research. But Dow never gave the FDA data on many of these patients, say congressional investigators for Rep. Ted Weiss, D-N.Y., whose subcommittee oversees the FDA.”
Even as Dow pursued liquid silicone at this time, complaints surfaced from women in Nevada brothels who had been injected with silicone.
“Thousands” of these women “started hollering,” recalled Dr. Edward Kopf, assistant professor of plastic surgery at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, complaining of problems such as lumps, silicone cysts and rock-hard breasts.
Kopf in 1975 successfully persuaded Nevada legislators to outlaw injectable silicone. Colorado and California quickly followed suit.
However, Dow continued pursuing silicone gel implants. In 1976, when the United States Congress finally authorized the FDA to regulate medical devices, these breast implants were exempted from regulation and FDA oversight because they had already been on the market.
A surgeon removes silicone gel from a woman’s breasts
Judy Foreman explains how an employee for Dow had protested against the use of silicone gel in implants, and was ignored by the company:
“That same year, Thomas Talcott, a Dow chemical engineer who says he had tried ‘to convince Dow for 13 months’ not to use fluid silicone for its gel-filled implants, quit the company. Talcott said ‘I could see no difference’ between the silicone Dow was putting into the gel and the liquid form the FDA in 1969 had said should not be injected into women's breasts.
Although the implant business was heating up, Dow continued to pursue liquid silicone. In 1978, the FDA gave approval to Dow for a study of injectable silicone for severe facial deformities, provided the company complete a seven-year follow up.
In 1990, Dow submitted its results to the FDA - but these reportedly were severely flawed. A third of the 128 people injected did not even have the facial deformities stipulated in the study design, according to Weiss' staff. Dow also submitted ‘before’ pictures but not ‘after’ pictures of many patients. And half the patients were followed for only four years. Two had severe skin tissue breakdown.”
“When breast implants were first sold in the U.S. in the 1960s, no testing was required to make sure they were safe. For the next 30 years, more than a million women in the U.S. got breast implants, not realizing that studies on women had never been done to prove they were safe or to determine how many months or years they would last.
In 1990, I was working as an investigator in the U.S. House of Representatives when a Senate staffer called me. She told me that her mom had gotten breast implants after a mastectomy, which had resulted in terrible problems including silicone leaking out of her nipples. Her mom was cured of cancer but the implants had put her through hell. I was sure that the FDA had very strict rules about safety testing, but I promised I’d look into it.
I found out that I was wrong: the FDA had never required clinical trials for breast implants. We held a Congressional hearing, I continued my investigation, and soon my office — and the media — was full of horror stories about women whose health had been ruined by breast implants.”
After decades of medical experimentation on women’s bodies, silicone breast implants were approved by the FDA in 2006. This decision was made 14 years after a moratorium was put in place in 1992 by the FDA as a response to the thousands of women who came forward with complaints that silicone from leaky or burst implants made them seriously ill — and over four decades after the chemical was first introduced in the United States for this cosmetic purpose.
The approval was granted by FDA director of the medical device division, Daniel Schultz, who resigned mired in controversy in 2009. He had been accused of financial corruption — of siding with industry suppliers against scientific recommendations.
In recent years, silicone breast implants have been linked to a novel form of breast cancer and class-action lawsuits.
In 2012, a scandal broke after a UK government report found that breast implants manufactured by the firm Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) had double the rupture rate of other implants. They were also found to be made of the sort of silicone used in mattresses. It is estimated that more than 400,000 women were affected around the world, and nearly 50,000 of those women were British. Latin America was worst hit, in particular Colombia, where there are estimated to be 60,000 victims.
Women described mysterious aches and pains, accompanied by extreme exhaustion. Some women reported intense headaches and nosebleeds. Still others reported collapsing from fatigue.
This year, a Paris appeals court ruling declared that the German firm TÜV Rheinland, which certified that the implants were safe, was negligent. TÜV Rheinland was ordered to pay out €60 million to 20,000 victims from Europe for medical negligence. However, that compensation only amounts to €3,000 each and doesn’t even cover the cost of the initial surgery, much less medical expenses accrued for illness.
On May 14, 2020, the U.S. FDA issued a warning letter to two breast implant manufacturers — Allergan of California and Ideal Implant Incorporated of Texas — for failing to comply with requirements that involved conducting studies to determine the potential risks and safety implants that were recalled in 2019. The FDA said it made the request “to protect women from breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL).”
In October, the US FDA placed warnings on breast implant packaging and told manufacturers to sell the devices only to health providers who review the potential risks with patients. Breast implants have been linked to a cancer of the immune system and to a host of other chronic medical conditions, including autoimmune diseases, joint pain, mental confusion, muscle aches and chronic fatigue.
“A decade ago, the FDA first identified a possible link between breast implants with a textured surface and a particular cancer, anaplastic large cell lymphoma.
In early 2019, after receiving hundreds of thousands of reports of adverse side effects linked to implants over the years, the agency heard testimony from dozens of women about their struggles with cancer and a constellation of other debilitating medical problems that developed after implant surgery, conditions that are often referred to as breast implant illness.”
The new FDA guidelines identify women who suffered breast cancer as most at risk for implant cancer — the group of women they are often marketed towards for reconstructive reasons. The FDA has also required full disclosure of breast implant ingredients for the first time in history.
One-third of women who have breast implant surgery will experience breast pain, sensitivity or loss of sensitivity in the breast, or asymmetry, according to the FDA.
Half will experience a painful tightening of scar tissue around the implant, and one-third will have implants that rupture or leak. Nearly 60 percent will need a repeat operation.
“It’s better than nothing, but it’s not as good as it could be,” said Diana Zuckerman, a scientist who heads the National Center for Health Research and was a member of the working group that advised the FDA on implant safety.
“They say things like, ‘Breast implants are associated with lymphoma,’ but lymphoma is actually caused by the implants,” Dr. Zuckerman told The New York Times. “People understand it if you say, ‘Breast implants can cause lymphoma.’”
This is by no means a comprehensive examination of the long history of medical abuse and experimentation performed on women by the male-dominated medical establishment and cosmetic surgery industry. Such an analysis is deserving of at least one, or several, books. My reason for drawing attention to the history of breast implants is twofold: firstly, this information has been hidden from public consciousness, and secondly, breast implants continue to be marketed towards women and have found renewed popularity due to the increasing prevalence of social media beauty influencers and the surge in so-called “gender-affirming” cosmetic surgeries.
Your writing and reporting is incredible. I learn so much. Thank you for this important work.