Plastic Surgery Obsession: Brazil’s Dr. Ivo Pitanguy Triggered It All

Plastic surgery, a 1950s curiosity, today is an obsession. How was it transformed? Who triggered its mania? Can it return to its roots: treating the disfigured and burned? Brazil's Ivo Pitanguy led plastic surgery from obscurity and ridicule to prominence and praise. He created its first dedicated hospital, founded by far its largest postgraduate school and charity, invented key operations for the head and body, and made Rio de Janeiro the planet's beauty surgery capital. The press reported his operations on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Persian Empress Farah Diba, French president Fran ois Mitterrand, and Frank Sinatra. A jet-setting Renaissance man who speaks six languages, Ivo has been friends with Salvador Dal , Audrey Hepburn, and Michael Caine. He built a fantasy lifestyle---circulating among a Rio mansion, a private Brazilian island, the Gstaad slopes, and Paris salons. His expansive media exposure provoked a backlash that reverberated for a decade. Yet afterward he emerged as one of the profession's most admired senior statesmen. Pitanguy regrets the overuse of cosmetic surgery, counsels how to avoid mishaps, and cheers the incredible reconstructive breakthroughs in the offing.

. John Holzer was educated at MIT and the University of Chicago. He lived in Rio de Janeiro and has a forty-year association with Brazil and the Pitanguy family. To unearth the story of plastic surgery’s incredible rise and Ivo Pitanguy’s central role in it, the author interviewed an eclectic collection of 100 surgeons, socialites, scholars, journalists, and taxi drivers on 4 continents; plowed through 10,000 articles, medical textbooks, scientific journals, history books & memoirs; and, at Pitanguy’s private and charity hospitals, observed massive facial reconstructions, complex burn surgeries, and extensive breast reductions besides face-lifts, brow-lifts, tummy tucks, and nasal remodelings. Holzer had unprecedented access to Pitanguy and his Rio estate, fabled tropical island, and medical, literary, and social universes.