[1] Ilizarov was born the eldest of six children to a poor Jewish family in Białowieża, Białystok Voivodeship, Republic of Poland.

[2] After finishing school in 1944, Ilizarov was sent to a rural hospital in Dolgovka, a village in Kurgan Oblast in Siberia, 2000 km east of Moscow.

[3] In 1950, he obtained a position within a General Surgery Department of the Kurgan Regional Hospital, which included a duty as a surgeon with the air ambulance.

[4] For long time, Ilizarov faced skepticism, resistance, and political intrigues from the medical establishment in Moscow, which tried to defame him as a quack.

[4] A breakthrough came in 1968, when Ilizarov successfully operated on Valeriy Brumel, the 1964 Olympic champion and a long-time world record holder in the men's high jump, who injured his right leg in a motorcycle accident.

The RISC RTO comprises an out-patient clinic where 250 patients can be consulted daily, a hospital with 800 beds, an experimental department, and animal surgery.

[12] In 1980, Carlo Mauri, an Italian mountaineer, explorer, and photojournalist, on the urgings of his Russian colleague Yuri Senkevich, travelled to Kurgan, in the Soviet Union.

Subsequent to this, Ilizarov was invited by Antonio Bianchi-Maiocchi and Roberto Cattaneo to be a guest speaker at the AO Italy conference in 1981 in Bellagio.

Victor Frankel, president of Hospital for Joint Diseases,[13][15] Dror Paley,[13] Alfred D. Grant,[13][14] and Stuart Green[13] who, in 1992, edited the first English translation of Ilizarov's book.

[19] Over 300 American orthopaedic surgeons attended an international symposium organised in 1987 in New York by the Hospital for Joint Diseases and the Smith & Nephew company to hear the lectures by Ilizarov.

The hospital of the German Accident Prevention & Insurance Association (Berufsgenossenschaftliches Unfallkrankenhaus, BGUK) in Boberg, Hamburg-Lohbrügge, became a major center in Germany applying and promoting the Ilizarov technique.