Plastic surgery is far more regulated today than it was when Dr. Gerow installed untested implants in Timmie Jean Lindsey’s chest in 1962. But the legacy of those early days is still with us—including in the process whereby a woman’s normal, healthy body is pathologized as a deformity in need of a surgical fix, and where the “ideal” is based as much as on what men desire as what women want.
