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![[Informed Consent]]( ../images/informedconsent.gif)
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John Swanson gave Dow Corning his heart and soul. Then he gave his wife's breasts.
Read all about it in Informed Consent . Author John Byrne is an experienced book author, a Business Week cover story writer, and in possession of a sure eye for the telling detail. His book casts long shadows. Purportedly it is about one couple's experience with silicone breast implants. But it is really about the desire to please and where it leads us.
The setting is a Sinclair Lewis-type company town, Midland, Michigan, amid the quiet conformity of the company families working for Dow Corning and Dow Chemical. In the foreground is a tragedy which emerges out of desperate clinging to a cult-like faith in one's employer and mass media role models.
It is the 1960s and 1970s. Women have been liberated to become whatever they want to be, from sex toys to CEOs. Technology is still a postwar god. In laboratories from coast to coast, plastic surgeons and chemists are sticking their fingers in jars of silicone or squeezing plastic bags to determine how to artifically create the feel of a mammary gland. Their success gives birth to the artificial breast implant.
John Swanson joins the company in 1966, moving from Minneapolis to Midland, Michigan as advertising supervisor, while the company is enjoying rapid growth based on its silicone products.
He becomes the personification of Dow Corning's ethics programs, helping the company's far-flung units audit their business practices for internal consistency. This includes monitoring pricing issues, political contributions, and potential conflicts of interest; also policing for bribes, payoffs, and kickbacks. Swanson's particular interest becomes the imagemaking of Dow Corning as an ethical concern.
Seven years into his job, John meets Colleen, each with their first marriage over. Swanson's career is going well; they marry in October 1973. One memorable day, during a PR campaign for breast implants, John and Colleen spend hours talking about the products with spokesman Silas Braley and his wife. In late March 1974, Colleen decides to get some for herself.
Though she signs a consent form, nothing on the form raises doubts in Colleen's mind about the safety of the procedure or its after-effects.
Years later, after watching a March 1989 Geraldo Rivera talk show featuring women with implant problems, she connects her almost constant medical problems since the surgery with the silicone implants themselves. Colleen Swanson eventually settles a lawsuit against her husband's employer, claiming they sold a product they could not be sure was safe. Dow Corning filed for bankruptcy in May of this year.
Today Colleen Swanson, who has gradually been losing her insides to surgical therapy, is one of many women whose doctors will not rule out breast implants as a contributor to auto-immune and other diseases. The litigation involving these women and the implant industry has been well reported elsewhere.
John Swanson gets half the royalties from this book, and got to check over John Byrne's final manuscript, an unusual privilege for someone not officially responsible as writer or editor of the book.
Thus his imprimatur is all over the story. Coincidentally perhaps, no one else comes out looking very good except the explant surgeon who removed Colleen's implants, and her doctor in Indiana today.
Informed Consent parades the faults of many. It would be easy to say this is a book about a couple and a company tragically involved in a silicone breast implant crisis. But it is much more than that. In John Swanson, Willy Loman-with his American dream turned to moral bankruptcy-is updated for us all. No intelligent reader should escape this tale of sadness and caution.
Jim Merickel is a free-lance writer living in Atlanta. His e-mail address is Jim_Merickel@bookpage.com
©1996, ProMotion, inc.