The team was led by Dr Thomas Cronin, who had been developing the world’s first silicone breast implants. Thomas Biggs, then 29, and a surgical resident under Cronin, says the idea came about when one of his colleagues, Frank Gerow, went to the blood bank. “They’d stopped putting liquids in glass bottles, and begun putting them into plastic bags,” says Biggs, “and he was walking in the hall with this bag of blood, and felt that it had the softness of a breast.” Around the same time, Cronin travelled “to New Orleans to a plastic surgery meeting and encountered a former resident of his. This fellow told him there was a company who had a new product which was interesting because it had very little body reaction, and could be made into a variety of thicknesses, a variety of viscosities, all the way from liquid to solid. If you can make a solid, you can make a bag – and if you can make a liquid, you can make something that goes in it.”
Cronin had the idea for a breast implant. A prototype was created, and implanted into a dog called Esmeralda. “That worked OK,” says Biggs, “and so then they got to Timmie Lindsey.”
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