The breast milk of the writer Florence Williams contains a striking level of perchlorate, a key component of rocket fuel. This does not, however, invest her with superpowers, as it might if she were a comic-book hero, or even make her special. Rather, as she explains in "Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History," her mammary glands are no different from those of most American women. In the year 2012, breast-feeding still passes many good things from mother to baby: vitamins, minerals and "a solid hedge of extras to help ward off a lifetime of diseases." But the practice also typically transfers "paint thinners, dry-cleaning fluids, wood preservatives, toilet deodorizers, cosmetic additives, gasoline by-products, rocket fuel, termite poisons, fungicides" and varieties of flame retardants, one of which, Penta-BDE, was banned by the European Union because of its chronic toxicity to humans.
George Silk/Time & Life Pictures — Getty Images
DDT is sprayed around a model to show that it won't contaminate her food, 1948.
BREASTS
A Natural and Unnatural History
By Florence Williams
Illustrated. 338 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.
"Breasts" is less a primer on anatomy than a catalog of environmental devastation akin to Rachel Carson's 1962 classic "Silent Spring," which detailed the impact of industrial chemicals — notably, the pesticide DDT — on animal life. But Williams, who cites Carson as an inspiration, has written a far scarier book. Carson examined birds and fish. Williams looks at us.
Breasts are made of fatty tissues that absorb "pollutants like a pair of soft sponges," she writes. They are malignancies waiting to happen. The incidence of breast cancer worldwide has doubled since 1940, and continues to rise. Because of various factors, which might include obesity and industrial contaminants, breasts are arriving earlier and becoming larger, often to the point of grotesqueness. Brassiere manufacturers who once made cups in sizes A to D have had to extend their range to H and KK.
For generations, male thinkers and opinion-shapers from Sigmund Freud to Hugh Hefner have enshrined the female breast as a locus of eroticism and nurturance. In "Breasts," Williams upends that perspective. She shows us our breasts as museums of deadly detritus — monstrous, menacing, potentially lethal. Breasts, the columnist Dave Barry once said, exist "to make males stupid." Today, when used for nursing, they could be making our children stupid: "Toxins in breast milk have been associated with lower I.Q., compromised immunity, behavioral problems and cancer."
Williams begins her tale in a more innocent time, long before breast milk became contaminated. She reports on anthropologists who have scoured fossil records for when and why breasts developed in the first place. Her research is far from armchair: she interviews, for example, a seal-lactation expert in Antarctica, a biologist who studies frozen "infant feces" at Boston College and an Australian dairy scientist who applied techniques from mining technology to measure human milk production.
Where lesser writers might gag or flee, Williams homes in, leavening her bleak overall message with macabre asides. For instance, Sir Astley Cooper's "On the Anatomy of the Breast," published in 1840, prompts an entertaining digression on grave-robbing. Back when Cooper was writing, she observes, "it was easier to scrounge up dead people's organs." But Britain's Anatomical Act of 1832 put an end to the fun, requiring dissectors to be licensed and restricting the availability of corpses.
Williams's account of the 1970s epidemic of "Tijuana silicone rot" — the gangrene and fatalities caused by illegal injections of silicone — is also queasy and wry. Free-floating in the body, silicone was a versatile killer. It caused embolisms and lodged in brains or lungs. In 1962, the same year that "Silent Spring" was published, a Houston surgeon first inserted the silicone bags into the breasts of a woman who had come to him to get a tattoo removed. She accepted the breast augmentation in exchange for an ear tuck (the cosmetic procedure she really wanted). But silicone implants proved fragile and often burst, and patients with burst implants began reporting ailments that ranged from joint pain to lupus. In 1992, after the F.D.A. issued a moratorium on the implants for most patients, Dow Corning, their maker, declared bankruptcy and entered into a $3.2 billion class-action settlement with 170,000 women, the largest class-action settlement at the time. (Subsequent studies, however, have not linked silicone implants to any disease; the moratorium was lifted in 2006, and today's market for silicone implants is strong and growing.)
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 14, 2012
An earlier version of this review erroneously stated that before a 1992 F.D.A. moratorium for most patients, burst silicone implants caused "ailments that ranged from joint pain to lupus." While such ailments were indeed reported by women with burst implants, subsequent studies established no link between the implants and any disease, and the moratorium was lifted in 2006. The earlier version of the review also contained a sentence erroneously stating that most breast augmentation today involves saline implants; in fact, silicone implants far outsell saline implants.
By M. G. LORD 16 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/books/review/breasts-by-florence-williams.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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