Ruth Handler Club children's television show, Mattel invested heavily in television advertising. The TV commercials for the Barbie doll paid off and Barbie rocketed Mattel and the Handlers to fame and fortune. Subsequently, they would add a boyfriend for Barbie named Ken, after the Handlers' son, and many other "friends and family" to Barbie's world. Handler was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1970. She had a modified radical mastectomy, which was often used at the time to combat the disease, and because of difficulties in finding a good breast prosthesis, she decided to make her own. Handler went on to found a
Elliot Philipp Elliot Philipp Elliot Philipp (July 20, 1915 – September 27, 2010) was a British gynaecologist and obstetrician who worked with Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards in developing in-vitro fertilisation and authored "The Technique of Sex" (1939) with the assistance of Sigmund Freud. Phillip was born to a Jewish family in Stoke Newington, the son of Clarisse (née Weil) and Oscar Philipp. His father - who was a cousin to Martha Bernays, the wife of Sigmund Freud - immigrated in 1908 to London from Hamburg to set up the metal trading firm Philipp Brothers. In 1939, he married Lucie Ruth Hackenbroch;