a challenging case. “The issues here,” he said, “are that she doesn’t really have a defined fold at all so we’re going to have to sort of create that. It puts her at a little bit of a risk for the implant moving down. So when I close it I’m going to have to tack it in place.” He went to work on her, cutting and singeing below her pectoral muscle. He pulled the space open with an instrument resembling a shoehorn. It’s called a Biggs Retractor, named after the Houston surgeon who trained with Cronin. Ciaravino motioned me over to catch a glimpse of Courtney’s heart beating between her ribs. The wound smelled of burning flesh.
When I’d seen enough, I stepped out to chat with the next patient in line, an insurance agent named Katie. She was thirty, a brown-haired mother of two, from Orange, Texas. She said she’s never been under anesthesia before, and she’s nervous. She wanted to go from a size A to just a small C because “we’re conservative people,” Katie explained. “It’s not like all my life, I said, ‘Oh myGod, I want boobs, I want fake boobs.’ I just want my clothes to fit better without having to buy an extra padded bra.” Not having implants, she said, “I’m like the minority, I think, in our circle of friends.” She laughs, patting down her hospital gown. “It’s peer pressure.”
DDT on Jones Beach, 1948
• 5 •
TOXIC ASSETS:
THE GROWING BREAST
I tell people I come from a different planet because the planet I arrived on is so unlike the planet of the 21st century. There were no plastics; there was less carbon dioxide. There were more fish in the sea. I come from the pre-Plasticozoic era.
— SYLVIA EARLE,
National Geographic explorer-in-residence
T HE SAME YEAR THAT TIMMIE JEAN WAS EXCHANGING an ear tuck for a boob job, Rachel Carson published a book about the destructive power of pesticides. These two events had more in common than it might appear, for both heralded a new era of synthetic compounds that would forever alter breasts. In 1958, the nature writer and biologist had received a disturbing letter from Olga Huckins, a gardener in Duxbury, Massachusetts. It described how the local authorities had sprayed fuel oil and DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) to kill mosquitos, leaving scores of songbirds dead in her neighborhood and in her very backyard. Huckins wrote that birds fell from the sky. Others perished in grotesque postures around her birdbath, their claws splayed, their bills gaping open.
Carson was already known as a voice for nature. The first female biologist hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, she’d written several odes to the sea, including the wildly popular best seller The Sea around Us. It won a National Book Award in 1952.
Inspired by Olga’s letter, Silent Spring was a measured and eloquent argument against the indiscriminate use of synthetic pesticides, which Rachel Carson called “elixirs of death.” She described the little-known work of scientists showing how DDT and its ilk caused damage beyond their target insects, affecting birds, fish, and other vertebrates. She got a couple of things wrong in the book, such as the statement that few carcinogens exist in nature (in fact, there are many, including the sun, wood smoke, and numerous viruses and fungi). She could be melodramatic, describing a future lifeless world and quoting Keats (“The sedge is wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing”). But history would prove her correct about the unanticipated effects of widely used neurotoxins in the environment. She introduced a nation to the idea that human actions and the natural world were inextricably linked, and that people had some obligation to protect that world. The United States’ seminal environmental legislation of the 1970s can be traced back to the wide constituency she built.
Carson made ecology a household word. Moreover, she placed the human body squarely within that ecology. She described the rising rates of cancer
When I’d seen enough, I stepped out to chat with the next patient in line, an insurance agent named Katie. She was thirty, a brown-haired mother of two, from Orange, Texas. She said she’s never been under anesthesia before, and she’s nervous. She wanted to go from a size A to just a small C because “we’re conservative people,” Katie explained. “It’s not like all my life, I said, ‘Oh myGod, I want boobs, I want fake boobs.’ I just want my clothes to fit better without having to buy an extra padded bra.” Not having implants, she said, “I’m like the minority, I think, in our circle of friends.” She laughs, patting down her hospital gown. “It’s peer pressure.”
DDT on Jones Beach, 1948
• 5 •
TOXIC ASSETS:
THE GROWING BREAST
I tell people I come from a different planet because the planet I arrived on is so unlike the planet of the 21st century. There were no plastics; there was less carbon dioxide. There were more fish in the sea. I come from the pre-Plasticozoic era.
— SYLVIA EARLE,
National Geographic explorer-in-residence
T HE SAME YEAR THAT TIMMIE JEAN WAS EXCHANGING an ear tuck for a boob job, Rachel Carson published a book about the destructive power of pesticides. These two events had more in common than it might appear, for both heralded a new era of synthetic compounds that would forever alter breasts. In 1958, the nature writer and biologist had received a disturbing letter from Olga Huckins, a gardener in Duxbury, Massachusetts. It described how the local authorities had sprayed fuel oil and DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) to kill mosquitos, leaving scores of songbirds dead in her neighborhood and in her very backyard. Huckins wrote that birds fell from the sky. Others perished in grotesque postures around her birdbath, their claws splayed, their bills gaping open.
Carson was already known as a voice for nature. The first female biologist hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, she’d written several odes to the sea, including the wildly popular best seller The Sea around Us. It won a National Book Award in 1952.
Inspired by Olga’s letter, Silent Spring was a measured and eloquent argument against the indiscriminate use of synthetic pesticides, which Rachel Carson called “elixirs of death.” She described the little-known work of scientists showing how DDT and its ilk caused damage beyond their target insects, affecting birds, fish, and other vertebrates. She got a couple of things wrong in the book, such as the statement that few carcinogens exist in nature (in fact, there are many, including the sun, wood smoke, and numerous viruses and fungi). She could be melodramatic, describing a future lifeless world and quoting Keats (“The sedge is wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing”). But history would prove her correct about the unanticipated effects of widely used neurotoxins in the environment. She introduced a nation to the idea that human actions and the natural world were inextricably linked, and that people had some obligation to protect that world. The United States’ seminal environmental legislation of the 1970s can be traced back to the wide constituency she built.
Carson made ecology a household word. Moreover, she placed the human body squarely within that ecology. She described the rising rates of cancer
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