Journalist David Castello-Lopes, in the program "Historically yours" on Europe 1, looks back every day on the origins of an object. This Monday, the origins: silicone breasts. "The size of the breasts is perhaps the number 1 complex of humanity," says the journalist. Every year, around the world, 1.5 million women have their breasts restored. To find out how 'we went from 0 to 1.5 million women with silicone breasts', David Castello-Lopes made the trip to Houston, Texas.
Why Houston in the United States? Because "this is where an old man lives, his name is Thomas Biggs". The latter is a doctor, he is the last living member of the medical team which placed the first silicone implant in the world, in 1962.
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"But, don't you think it looks like a breast ?!"
Before the 60s, there had already been plenty of attempts to make women's breasts bigger but by putting things or components in them that were then not suitable ... like ivory, beef cartilage , sponges, and especially silicone alone, injected directly into the breasts. In addition to not giving the desired effect, these processes were dangerous.
At the beginning of the 1960s, in hospitals, a practice began to democratize. At first glance innocuous, it had unexpected consequences. What practice? Replace the glass bottles that contained blood for transfusions with plastic bags ... A colleague of Thomas Biggs, at the Houston hospital, handles one of these bags and exclaims: "But, you don't think that 'it looks like a breast?! ". Affirmative, responds young Thomas Biggs. The idea was born. Thomas Biggs and his peers order a silicone pocket prototype.
"Were they part of me?
The first test takes place on a dog named Esmeralda, who does not die during or after the operation. It remained to find a female guinea pig. "We once had a lady who had tattoos on her breasts with her boyfriend's name and she broke up with him so she wanted to take them off," Thomas Biggs tells David Castello-Lopes. Response of the medical profession of the time to this woman? "Ok, how would you like to have bigger breasts?" It was 58 years ago, Timmy Lindsay then became the first woman in the history of the world to receive silicone breasts.
Timmy Lindsay is now an 85-year-old woman. Contacted a few days earlier before the visit of the journalist from Europe 1 to Thomas Biggs, she confided to the American doctor: "All these years, I never really thought about my breasts. They were right there. They were part of me".