Breast implant
Since the late nineteenth century, breast implants have been used to surgically augment the size (volume), modify the shape (contour), and enhance the feel (tact) of a woman's breasts. In 1895, surgeon Vincenz Czerny effected the earliest breast implant emplacement when he used the patient's autologous adipose tissue, harvested from a benign lumbar lipoma, to repair the asymmetry of the breast from which he had removed a tumor. In 1889, surgeon Robert Gersuny experimented with paraffin injections, with disastrous results.
William Stewart Halsted
Halsted held the belief that cancers spread through the bloodstream, which led him to think that sufficient local removal of the tumor would cure the cancer. This belief led him to perform the first radical mastectomy for breast cancer in the U.S. at Roosevelt Hospital in New York in 1882; an operation first performed in France a century earlier by Bernard Peyrilhe (1735-1804). Halsted had observed a German surgeon perform increasingly aggressive surgeries to remove cancerous tumors from the breast, but the patients still relapsed even with this more aggressive surgery. An English surgeon, Charles Moore, believed that even more breast tissue should be removed and doctors that were trying to save women from disfigurement were doing them a disservice. Halsted took this to the next level, eventually resorting to removing the pectoralis major, lymph nodes near the collar bone, and lymph nodes near the armpit. Some surgeons in Europe even removed ribs from women with breast cancer. This caused great disfigurement of the women operated on. Halsted presented his findings at the American Surgical Association conference in New Orleans in 1898, concluding that the procedure slashed the percentage of local reoccurrence. He also presented more findings in 1907, showing the same results. Although, the radical mastectomy throughout the years has come under fire. It is now known that survival from breast cancer is more closely related to how much the cancer has spread before surgery than how much is removed during surgery.