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Jackie Onassis, Niki Lauda, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, and Gina Lollobrigida were some of the celebrities that went under the knife of Ivo Pitanguy, one of the world's top plastic surgeons. Pitanguy helped make Brazil a leading destination for plastic surgery tourism and a country with one of the highest rates of cosmetic operations.
He attracted the attention of the wealthy worldwide through foreign magazine articles and TV shows. He always kept his list of famous patients a secret, however, even in his biography, which was published in 2014. He was a friend of some of the leading personalities of the 20th century, including Jean Paul Sartre, Alain Delon, Roman Polanski, and Salvador Dali.
Despite being closely linked to the purely aesthetic effects of surgery, Pitanguy excelled first as a specialist in reconstructive surgery, dealing with cases of congenital deformities or injuries from burns. "Throughout his career, he had always been very attached to the area of reconstructive surgeries," says Claudio Rebello, a member of the Brazilian Society of Plastic Surgery.
In 1961 Pitanguy and his colleagues gained national recognition by making a joint effort to meet the victims of one of the worst fires in the history of the country-that which affected the Grand North American...