We could say that implants silicone are now part of our daily lives. Are so widespread that we take for granted, but how many of us know its history? Here is a brief historical overview that, perhaps, we will reveal some details about the unexpected best friends little … shapely women. The homeland of silicone implants can be considered the U.S. city of Houston. For here the plastic surgeons Cornini Thomas and Frank Gerow in 1960 created in collaboration with Dow Corning Corporation, the first silicone breast implant, which was planted in 1962 in Timmi Jean Lindsey at the Houston’s Hermann Hospital (now Memorial Hermann Hospital).

Since then many patients were anxious to get a prosthetic implant to increase the volume of your breasts. But the one created by Gerow and Cornini was not the first breast implant history: in 1895 a German surgeon had tried implanting in the womb of the firm actress fat taken from a lipoma (a benign tumor) of the woman herself and this first pioneering effort was followed by the implants paraffin, almost immediately abandoned because of the often very negative, the health of patients. Also it is rumored that in the years before the Revolutionary found the two American surgeons, some prostitutes were injected directly into the silicone breast with predictable results.

It was during the early nineties in the United States broke the media and legal storm that swept over silicone implants, and Dow Corning Corporation, which had put on the market: during the TV show Face to Face with Connie Chung silicone implants were described as “poisonous” and put on trial so that the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in 1992 forbade its use for purposes cosmetic reconstructive purposes by limiting its application to a few groups of women who had undergone a mastectomy.

In the media storm followed an avalanche of complaints and in fact the first court case ended in 1991 with a claim for damages amounting to 7 million and 300 thousand dollars by Marian Hopkins. The woman was suffering because of an autoimmune disease whose onset was attributed to the plant prostheses. It appears that first-generation implants had to pass the threshold of some molecules of silicone in the tissues, causing inflammatory reactions that could lead to major autoimmune diseases, but has never been shown to have played a role in the development of diseases such as cancer.

Currently in the United States containing saline implants are used that have a less natural to the eye and touch. In the rest of the industrialized countries, where the silicone has never been banned, are now in use next-generation implants, more often, with double or triple room, so very safe, and with an outer casing in a silicone elastomeric material is particularly resistant flexible. In the United States seems to be currently undergoing a sort of rehabilitation of silicone implants dictated by the evidence that there was no indication any hazard to health in the new prosthesis.