Whatever the pablum peddled by politicians and the media, the public attention span and memory are both short, so it's easy to forget the flap there was in the 1990s about the supposed dangers of silicone breast implants, especially in the wake of the 1992 FDA decision to call a moratorium on the sale and implantation of the devices until their safety could be properly, scientifically established: at first the rumour was that they could cause cancer, but after this nonsense had been laid to rest -- which didn't take long -- the next piece of pseudomedical quackery came along, which was the widespread conviction that they were responsible for the very unpleasant condition called mixed connective tissue disease, a malfunction of the immune system. And this time the rumour must be true, because after all wasn't it being demonstrated time after time in the nation's courts that the lives of poor, defenseless women were being destroyed by these infernal devices . . . with the massive damages awards being levied on the dastardly manufacturers serving as emphasis to the truth of it all?

Well, no. There never was any evidence at all that silicone breast implants represented the slightest health hazard. The "science" produced in court was the kind of stuff Snopes.com was invented to expose. Juries (and judges) were whipped up into hysteria by tort lawyers who realized they could earn themselves enormous fees by playing on people's fears of disease and detestation of ruthless corporations and abjuring any connection with such trivia as facts and reality. As a measure of the virulence of these people, when the first scientific reports came in, from 1994, demonstrating the near certainty that the implants were harmless, not only did the lawsuits continue but also legal attempts were made to silence the scientists who'd done the research! Not only had the inmates taken over the institution, they were being paid handsomely for doing so.

Marcia Angell, who was then Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, is an excellent teller of this tale of confusion, ignorance, panic and, I'd suggest, criminal abuse of the law. She spells out early on that her own general pre-existing prejudices on approaching the task were those of a liberal feminist, and that some of her preconceptions about the rights and wrongs of the episode were very far from validated: in particular, she reveals that for once the corporations -- companies like Dow Corning, driven into bankruptcy by the fracas -- were the victims. She's right in this, obviously, although it's hard to feel undiluted sympathy for them because they were in good measure responsible for bringing this catastrophe upon themselves: Having grown accustomed, during the years of Genial Uncle Ronnie when human welfare was a distant second to the profits of big business and the greed of the wealthy, to an FDA that was sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything, when David Kessler, appointed by Bush Senior as the FDA's new boss, demanded from the implant manufacturers supportive scientific research to show their products were safe, they essentially didn't bother doing anything -- presumably assuming the silly little man would go away and stop bothering them. In the end, clearly frustrated beyond all bounds of patience and genuinely concerned there might be safety issues lurking behind the manufacturers' inaction, Kessler introduced the moratorium. It was the FDA ban that really opened the floodgates to all the claims of implant-caused illness, because after all the FDA wouldn't have banned them if they weren't really dangerous, would it?

Those of a delicate disposition -- me, for example -- might want to avoid Angell's Chapter Two, which describes the surgical procedures involved in various forms of breast augmentation and then all the many things that can go ruinously wrong with said procedures. I was reading this chapter in a pub in Toronto and was mighty glad I was positioned within easy reach of plenty of stomach-settling beer. (The rest of the pub was watching a World Cup match on t'telly, so assumed my occasional moans and retches were commentary on the state of play.) My only real complaint about the book was that the copy I had was defective, containing at the back a repeat of the first 32pp signature rather than the 32pp that should have been there, containing most of the notes/references, the biblio and, most devastatingly of all, the index. Grr!

Anyway, this is a very good book, and wonderfully readable. Don't be tempted to think its subject is ancient history: although the specifics may have changed a bit, its subject is highly topical in that, at the moment, he have a similar hysterical flap going on over the nonsensical belief that vaccination causes autism . . . to mention just one. ( )