The 19th century breast implants
Since the late nineteenth century, breast implants have been used to surgically augment the size (volume), change the shape (contour), and improve the feel (tact) of a girl’s breasts. Dr Vincenz Czerny (1842-1916), a surgical leader in breast reconstruction became the first when he used the patient’s autologous adipose tissue, reaped from a benign lumbar lipoma, to fix the asymmetry of the breast from which he’d removed a tumour in 1895. In 1889, surgeon Robert Gersuny experimented with paraffin injections, with fatal results.
The 20th century breast implants
In the mid-twentieth century, Morton I. Berson, in 1945, and Jacques Maliniac, in 1950, each performed flap-established breast augmentations by rotating the patient’s chest wall tissue into the breast to raise its volume. In 1964, the French firm Laboratoires Arion produced the saline breast implant and developed, full of saline solution, and after that it was introduced to be used as a medical device in 1964.
Since then it has continued to grow in safety and popularity and Breast implants have become the norm.
