“The large pendulous breast was seen for many centuries as a sign of the outré and primitive. Herman Heinrich Ploss’s ethnographic study of ‘woman,’ first published in 1885, refers to the breasts of the ‘black’ race as resembling a goat’s udder. The anthropologist Hans Friedenthal was even to claim, in his 1925 essay “Muttersprache and Mutterbrust,” that the structure of primitive languages was formed by the pressure of the savage mother’s breast, referring to nurture patterns among ‘Hottentots and Bushmen’ and to the ‘strange sounds of their languages which is in harmony with the club-shaped breasts of the mothers which shaped the lips of the nursing child.’”

Fiona MacCarthy, Skin Deep, a review of 2 books about cosmetic surgery in The New York Review of Books, Oct. 7, 1999, p. 20