Medical tourism and breast enlargement in South Africa

With the convenience of modern air travel, and greater accessibility of cosmetic surgery, we have seen an explosion of medical tourism – patients who travel from their home countries for a variety of reasons to South Africa to have procedures done by local specialists. As daunting as this may sound, many patients regularly come to South African breast enlargement specialists and especially Cape Town for their plastic surgery, as it offers good value for money, and world class plastic surgery facilities and plastic surgeons. Breast augmentation in Cape Town has become a popular option for people taking one of these trips. Cape Town’s history of medical expertise is widely known and anybody in South Africa would undoubtedly choose Cape Town breast augmentation.




It may be hard to believe but breast augmentation dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, 1885 is the earliest recorded date of surgery to alter the shape of breasts. Over the course of the next fifty years, dozens of different procedures, methods and substances were tried and tested to perform breast augmentation. The early days of breast augmentation were dangerous to say the least and often fatal. The first recorded breast enlargement was performed by a surgeon named Vincenz Czerny using a woman’s own adipose tissue injected into her breast. Shortly after that, in 1899, an Austrian doctor named Robert Gersuny injected liquid paraffin into a woman’s breasts to enhance the size. You don’t need a medical degree to imagine how well that worked. At the beginning of the twentieth century a whole host of different material and substances were tried. These included ivory, glass balls, ground rubber and ox cartilage. There is also a list of chemicals as long as my arm most of which you can’t imagine anyone wanting to put in their bodies. Polyvinyl alcohol-formaldehyde polymer sponge is my favourite!




It was Japanese prostitutes, after the Second World War who revolutionised breast enlargement surgery. They started having liquid silicone injected into their breasts to enlarge them. The use of free silicone injections was banned in the USA when the adverse side effects were discovered. In 1962, Cronin and Gerow developed the first silicone implant - a simple silicone envelop filled with liquid silicone, and changed the course of breast augmentation forever. It was the first time a somewhat natural look and feel had been achieved through implants.




These first generation silicone breast implants were notable for a very thin and fragile outer silicone envelope containing a very liquid and "runny" silicone gel – it wasn’t long before problems set in, with loss of the shell integrity and the gel oozing out into the breasts and beyond. Modern silicone gel implants bear little resemblance to the prototypes and usually have a thick, textured outer silicone shell and contain a cohesive, thick, semi-solid, form stable inner gel, sometimes referred to as "gummy bears". They are significantly firmer than the early implants and much more robust.

In little over a century breast augmentation has gone from the point of fatal experimentation to being part of what the media refer to as surgery and safari packages. Cape Town plastic surgery is now a popular choice for people engaging in medical tourism.