Medicine: Plastic Surgery

Else K. LaRoe, a Manhattan plastic surgeon, well knows how much discomfort women will stand in order to have a good figure, or even the illusion of one. She herself is a small, trim, exuberantly vivacious blonde in her forties. She claims to have lifted many faces, corrected many double chins, eye pouches, rolls of body fat. But her specialty is the woman with a "bust problem." She has now collected much of her experience in a book, The Breast Beautiful (Field; $2.50). Few doctors will consider it important, but to women its subject is of perennial interest.

Of herself, she tells the following: Born in Germany, Else LaRoe did Red Cross work during World War I at Lucerne, and there she met famed Spy Mata Hari (Margaretha Geertruida Zelle MacLeod), who, she recalls, had a perfect posture, a walk as slinky as a stripteaser's. Mata Hari was much interested in the surgery being done on a young French soldier whose nose had been mutilated. Else LaRoe watched the operation, too, and her interest in plastic surgery dawned. She went to Heidelberg's medical school, started on general surgery interspersed with birth-control work in Russia. Her birth-control book published in Germany has been burned by the Nazis. She settled down to plastic surgery 15 years ago, emigrated to the plastically profitable U. S. in 1932.

The fashion of tightly laced waists, which flourished off & on for several hundred years, caused women great harm and discomfort. Despite the gibes of Satirist Montaigne and the objurgations of several French kings and of Cardinal Richelieu, ladies kept trying to cut themselves in two. In the late 18th Century, a lady had to call in both a manservant and a maidservant for the lacing job, and if she was stout the two helpers had to use a wooden crank. Ribs of these unfortunates were often so compressed that they overlapped, bringing on lung trouble, hemorrhages, other internal disorders. Two-thirds of hospitals' emergency calls were for wasp-waisted women who had fainted in public places.

After World War I, when women felt emancipated, they fell hard for the "boyish form" fashion. They tried to obliterate their breasts by binding them with tight brassieres—in many cases making them flabby and pendulous. Dr. LaRoe is a great admirer of the modern brassiere, which combines proper support with alluring and healthful freedom.

Dr. LaRoe believes the reason why breasts sag is inherent in the manner of their attachment to the chest. The breast is a separate organ, attached to the fan-shaped pectoral muscle by connective tissue. If this tissue is naturally weak, or is weakened by maltreatment, the breast will sag. Harsh confinement hampers the circulation, and so the tissue weakens because of inadequate nourishment from the blood.

Dr. LaRoe declares that breast-feeding benefits mother as well as child. The gland tissue is healthier for doing its natural duty. If the baby is not nursed, the milk supply is troublesome to dry up; but if it is nursed, gradual weaning allows the milk to dwindle naturally. Moreover, breast-feeding stimulates contractions of the womb, which help it to return to its normal size and condition.