Pierre Foldès

Pierre Foldès (born 6 May 1951 in Paris) is a French-Hungarian urological surgeon known for developing a surgical method of repairing some of the damage caused by female genital mutilation. He qualified in medicine in 1978 and discovered the extent of the harm while working as a surgeon in Burkina Faso, where he repaired fistulas caused by difficult childbirths; he performed his first repair in 1984 and has operated on about five thousand women since developing the technique in 1998. His procedure removes scar tissue from the vulva, lowers the clitoris by cutting its supporting ligaments while preserving nerves and vessels, and reconstructs a clitoral glans. With the gynecologist Odile Buisson he published the first complete 3D sonography of the stimulated clitoris in 2008. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 2005.