Staying Abreast

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the world's first silicon breast augmentation.

For almost a hundred years doctors, and patients, had been experimenting with various ways to change the size and shape of breasts.  The first recorded case of a breast implant in the literature was undertaken by a German surgeon named Vincenz Czerny, who transplanted a benign fat tumour (known as a lipoma) to reduce asymmetry after removing a tumour from a woman's breast.  Since that time various methods of using the patient's own tissue have been tried, mainly at the time of surgery to effect a reconstruction.