Of all the things that happened in the stressful days after 72-year-old Liz Spooner had her leg amputated at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro in 2022, one memory stands out clearly in her daughter Faye Harrison’s mind. Liz’s surgery had taken much longer than expected, Faye remembers, and, confused from the anaesthetic and morphine, Liz had started refusing food and medication. That’s when Faye was taken into a side room with a consultant surgeon.
“He was smiley. He seemed quite charming and caring,” Faye recalls. He went through a long list of the medications Liz was taking and explained why she needed them. “I remember looking down – you look down at the floor a lot during conversations like that – and I noticed he had metal sticks coming out of his trouser legs.” Faye blinks in disbelief at the memory. “I thought, wow, he’s operated on my mum, but he’s also an amputee.”
Neil Hopper was a well-known figure in the world of vascular surgery – the specialist field dealing with veins and arteries, and therefore amputations. He had been a consultant for ten years by the time of Liz’s operation and had received awards for clinical excellence. But in May 2019, after suspected sepsis, Hopper himself had to have both legs amputated below the knee. When he walked into the operating theatre on prosthetic legs in January 2020, ready to perform amputations on patients again, a BBC camera crew was there to film his heroic return. He talked about his experience with sepsis on ITV’s This Morning, wearing shorts that proudly showed his prosthetics. Using the handle @bionicsurgeon, he had shared his experiences as a disabled doctor on social media. He even applied to the European Space Agency, hoping to become the world’s first astronaut with a disability. He won many awards: named one of the coolest people in Cornwall and one of the bravest people in Britain.
But Faye chose not to mention his legs during their 15-minute conversation about her mum. Instead, she made some small talk: noticing Hopper’s Welsh accent, she said Cornwall’s beaches were far better than Wales’s. It was an odd situation, but there was at least something comforting about knowing the man caring for her mother was himself an amputee. “I remember thinking, God, he must have amazing empathy.” Coming out of the side room, Faye told her husband about the extraordinary surgeon she’d just met. “It’s awful, really, but I remember saying, ‘He’s got prosthetic legs – and his name’s Hopper.’ Because, in times like that, you look for anything that’s going to make you laugh.”
It had been a difficult few days for Liz’s family, but the ordeal had started a year earlier, when she fell on the beach and broke her leg. A people person, Liz was a former nurse who went on to manage a children’s home in Birmingham for 12 years before settling in Cornwall. After her husband’s death in 2009, she filled her days volunteering at the RNLI shop in Rock. It was after a shift there, while walking her dog, that Liz tripped and broke her left femur. It didn’t heal properly and, six months later, she had surgery to insert a metal rod in her leg, which then became infected. In July 2022, Liz was told she needed to make a choice: she could either take antibiotics for the rest of her life, which might stop working, or have her leg amputated. “Get rid of that bloody leg, get rid of the infection, and she’s going to be all right, we thought,” Faye says.
“She was never my mum again, after that operation.”
They expected the procedure to take five or six hours, butFaye tells me it took 11 or 12 attempts. While recovering on the high-dependency unit, Liz became paranoid and delusional. She told Faye there were ghosts in her room, that people were out to get her, and that she was being secretly filmed. “The nurses and doctors said this was normal after a very big anaesthetic and all the morphine. But she never really came out of that state. She was never my mum again after that operation.” Liz then caught pneumonia while in hospital, and nine days after her surgery, she died.
Faye says no one ever explained why her mum’s procedure had taken so much longer than expected. She wondered if a shorter operation might have meant Liz wouldn’t have been so delirious afterwards, or she might not have stayed in hospital long enough to catch the pneumonia that killed her. But Liz had always trusted the NHS, and so does Faye—she works as an NHS speech and language therapist. She assumed her mum had just been very unlucky. “No reason to doubt anything,” she shrugs.
An NHS surgeon who had his legs removed to satisfy a sexual interest has been jailed for fraud. Read more.
Then, three years after her mother’s death, in September 2025, Faye was listening to the news on her drive to work and heard Neil Hopper’s name. He had been jailed after pleading guilty to two counts of fraud by false representation and three counts of possession of extreme pornography. The fraud conviction was linked to claims he had made on his health insurance after the amputation of his legs. Hopper had not actually had sepsis—the injuries that led to his legs being amputated were self-inflicted. He had deliberately harmed himself because he had an amputation fetish.
Faye felt like she was going to be sick. “Oh my God, I felt sick that he was even near my mum.”
Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS trust issued a statement on the day Hopper was convicted. “We want to reassure the public that our exhaustive investigations have found no evidence whatsoever to indicate any risk or harm to patients at our hospitals,” it said. But Faye was not reassured.
“Who gets their own legs amputated when there’s nothing wrong with them? And then to think that he’d been a doctor. And then—even worse—a doctor who performs amputations on other people.” Questions swirled in her head. “My mum was in that operating room for a very, very long time. Was something going on?”
Across Cornwall and beyond, Hopper’s former patients and their families were asking similar questions. Here was a surgeon willing to lie for years to his colleagues, his patients, the public, and his closest family about the nature of his injuries—a man who, based on the extreme pornography he was convicted of possessing, took pleasure in seeing people in excruciating pain. How could anyone be sure he never posed any risk to patients?
Hopper stayed completely silent after his arrest in March 2023. He answered “No comment” in his two police interviews and did not speak in court. Perhaps the best insight into his mindset and character comes from comparing his “Bionic Surgeon” persona with the truth that came out during his criminal trial and his fitness to practise tribunal. The contrast highlights the questions that remain for Hopper’s former patients—and his former employers.
On the surface, at least, Hopper seemed to live a very ordinary life before he lost his legs. The son of two nurses, he grew up in Aberystwyth and Swansea and attended a private boarding school. He studied at the University of Wales College of Medicine in Cardiff, earning a first-class degree in anatomical sciences and an honours degree in medicine. He met his future wife at medical school, they had a son and a daughter, and the family spent a year in Australia, where Hopper worked as a vascular surgeon in Sydney, before returning to the UK in 2013 to work as a consultant surgeon at both the Royal Cornwall hospital and the Duchy, Cornwall’s only private hospital.I developed a strong interest in vascular surgery mainly because it was reconstructive—no two operations were ever the same, and working on all parts of the body gave me the variety that kept me engaged,” Hopper told the Western Mail in 2021.
In April 2019, according to his account, Hopper and his daughter fell ill during a family camping trip. “My daughter got better, but I didn’t, so my family left me at home thinking I had a stomach bug. I started feeling achy, took some paracetamol, and went to bed,” he told Cornwall Live in February 2020. Later, while his wife and children were visiting her parents, his wife called him and he “spoke gibberish” on the phone. She then contacted a friend, who went to check on him, found the front door open, and called an ambulance. “The next thing I remember is being in intensive care,” Hopper continued. “I remember my feet hurting a lot.”
In the chatrooms and on the message boards, members who had undergone verified castration, amputation, or genital removal were given special badges of honor.
Hopper told doctors he had been vomiting and had diarrhea. He underwent extensive testing, but medical staff were puzzled by the cause of his condition. Eventually, they suspected sepsis. “I could see my toes had gone blue, so at that point I knew where I was headed,” he later told the BBC; blue skin on the soles of the feet is a recognized sign of sepsis. For two weeks, his medical colleagues tried to improve the blood supply to his legs. He was transferred from the Royal Cornwall Hospital to Derriford, a specialist training hospital, for hyperbaric oxygen therapy. But it was in vain. Once amputation began to look inevitable, he told the BBC, he “couldn’t help but imagine the mechanics” of what it would involve. “The thought of power tools being used on me was icky.” Hopper’s toes were removed on 10 May, and when that wasn’t deemed sufficient, he chose to have both lower legs removed on 17 May.
“I’m now a bilateral below-knee amputee, which is quite ironic, given my job,” Hopper declared in the first video uploaded to his YouTube channel, six months after his surgery; by then, he had already started calling himself the Bionic Surgeon. In another video, uploaded to mark his first year as an amputee, he boasted about getting an all-expenses-paid trip to Salford to appear on BBC Breakfast. In early 2022, he revealed he was undergoing assessments in Hamburg with the European Space Agency, aiming to become the world’s first para-astronaut; he made it to the final 27 candidates. “When I was ill, somebody told me I’d end up doing Ted Talks and all sorts, and I said absolutely not, this was never going to be a big part of my life, and I’ve completely fallen into that trap,” he chuckled on BBC Radio Cornwall. He knew his injuries had opened up a particular kind of opportunity for him. “My life is more interesting because of what’s happened to me,” he told a Welsh BBC documentary crew, just before his arrest.
But Hopper’s journey to becoming the Bionic Surgeon actually began the year before he lost his legs, with a very different set of videos. It was revealed during his criminal trial that, in August 2018, Hopper used the email address adecentguyincornwall@gmail.com to set up the profile “AdmiroDoc” on eunuchmaker.com, a pay-per-view fetish website featuring videos of men and boys either maiming themselves or allowing others to mutilate them on camera. Marius Gustavson, the Norwegian man living in London who ran the site, had had his own penis, nipple, and left leg removed. Gustavson is currently serving a life sentence for multiple offenses, including causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
“I can see how Neil Hopper got into it,” says the man who was known as “Michael” during Gustavson’s trial. “I don’t thHe just got it into his head one day to type in ‘Eunuch Maker’ – I think he was on various fetish sites looking for more and more extreme stuff and found his way there. A bit of passing interest, and then as soon as you’re on that site, it becomes an echo chamber.
Michael was the first person to report Gustavson to the police, after Gustavson had castrated him on video and branded him with the initials “EM”. Michael had been in a vulnerable mental state and was using drugs when Gustavson mutilated him; he went to the police when he was in recovery a year later, and realized he’d been the victim of what the judge in Gustavson’s trial would call “little more than human butchery”. “The thing with that website is, it made all of this seem absolutely normal,” Michael says.
The site operated between 14 January 2018 and 1 March 2021, during which time Gustavson earned almost £300,000 from more than 22,800 paying users from across the globe. (The victims who appeared in the videos were promised money from the revenue; Michael says his castration earned him £60, which didn’t even cover the cost of his travel.) In the chatrooms and on the message boards, members who had undergone verified castration, amputation or genital removal were given special badges of honour. “It was a community. Very supportive, very welcoming and very enthusiastic,” Michael tells me.
“There were always rumours of, oh, there’s an actual surgeon here, there’s an actual nurse,” he continues. There was a nurse, it turned out: Nathan Arnold, who received a suspended sentence after he was found guilty of GBH for removing Gustavson’s nipple. And there was Hopper. “It’s absolutely horrifying to learn that a consultant surgeon in the NHS really was there.”
I am reluctant to describe the videos Hopper was watching – which I learned about when I attended his criminal court hearing via video link – but the broad details are relevant to his patients. Hopper was performing surgery on them in his professional life while watching people writhing in agony in his private life; this was pornography so sadistic and extreme that possession of it added 10 months to the 22-month prison sentence he received for insurance fraud.
The first video cost Hopper £10; it shows Gustavson castrating another man. The second, costing £35, features a man tied to a bed while Gustavson rolls dice to decide which body parts to remove; the man ended up losing his penis and testicles, and bled so much that Gustavson called an ambulance, all with the camera still rolling. In a third video, also costing Hopper £35, a man cuts off his own penis and holds it up to the camera.
Hopper does not regret the facts of the amputations – he had wanted it for 20 years – but he regrets the dishonesty and falsehood. “I’ve watched them thousands of times,” Hopper enthusiastically messaged Gustavson on WhatsApp, singling out the video where paramedics had to be called for particular praise.
Hopper was paying for these videos a few months after operating on a woman I’ll call Joan. We meet in a cafe in west London; she doesn’t want me to say where she lives or use her real name. Joan had booked into the private Duchy hospital to have a varicose vein removed in advance of her daughter’s wedding. “He was the vein man at the Duchy,” she tells me. “He seemed very nice, really easy-going. He’s a sort of cuddly man – slightly overweight and jolly-looking. I warmed to him.” She thought it was going to be straightforward. “My mother and one of my sisters had had veins removed before, and neither of them had ever had any problems.”
Throughout the 30-minute procedure, Hopper was in charge of removing Joan’s vein and administering the anaesthetic. “I hurt a lot,” she says, fixing me with her gaze. At first, she didn’t want to make a fuss. “I’mImmediately go to NHS England or the Royal College of Surgeons and say, ‘Please help us work out what’s happened’?”
“Our priority from the start has been to investigate Mr Hopper’s actions so we can reassure patients that there’s no evidence of risk or harm to them,” a spokesperson for the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust said in response to this article. “RCHT carried out clinical reviews of all amputation surgeries performed by Mr Hopper at our hospitals over a two-year period specified by police investigators. These were part of the police investigation process. Our investigations found no evidence to suggest any risk or harm to patients.”
The RCHT added that complex vascular surgery is always managed by a team of healthcare professionals and is never the decision of a single surgeon. “We’ve received reassurance on vascular surgical outcomes between 2013 and 2023 from the National Vascular Registry, who analysed our data for that period and said further analysis wouldn’t add value to this case.”
David Parker was one of the first patients Hopper operated on after he returned to work with prosthetic legs. He was clearly still getting used to them: David says when they first met for his consultation, Hopper “fell in the doorway and fell into his chair.” But it was winter, and Hopper was wearing long trousers instead of shorts, so David had no idea his surgeon was an amputee. He only realised about a year later, when he saw a documentary on regional television. “It was saying what a hero he was, still doing his job after having his legs removed.”
By that time, David didn’t consider Hopper a hero. He’d had a procedure to unblock an artery in his neck; Hopper had assured him it would be straightforward and shouldn’t take more than one or two hours, but it ended up taking an entire day. David remembers waking up during surgery and being roughly pushed back down onto the operating table. Ever since he came out of theatre six years ago, he’s suffered from debilitating nerve pain. He’s spent all his retirement savings on private physiotherapy, with little success.
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‘Something happened in the surgery that day, which I’m still living with’: David Parker, one of Hopper’s patients. Photograph: Max Searl/The Guardian
“The day after the surgery, Mr Hopper came and sat on the side of my bed. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Do you remember anything from yesterday?’ And I said, ‘Well, I remember waking up.’ He said, ‘No, no, that didn’t happen. That’s probably just the anaesthetic playing tricks on your mind.’ I never saw him again.”
David says he’s since had it confirmed by other staff present during the procedure at the Royal Cornwall Hospital that he did wake up during surgery. He’s been trying to work out how he came to be injured ever since, with years of emails and follow-up meetings. Once the news of Hopper’s conviction broke, David says, “My case made a lot more sense. Something happened in the surgery that day, which I’m still living with.” The nerve damage could have occurred during the procedure on his vein or when he was pushed down onto the operating table. David accepts he may never find out.
He doesn’t believe the trust’s claim that Hopper never posed any risk to patients. “I can’t imagine a man with so many psychological problems being able to do surgery and put all his personal life to one side. It just wouldn’t happen, would it?” He sighs.
“Professionals can talk about his professional life – I’ll talk about his private life,” Michael says when I put this to him. “At the time I was on that website, it was constantly there in my mind. It colours everything. It takes years to get it out of your system. If you’re looking at that sort of stuff, and it’s the same stuff you’re doing at work day-to-day…”Yes – I’d find it very hard to separate things like that. I don’t think it would be possible.”
It’s the constant not knowing – the lifelong, nagging doubt – that keeps causing trauma for Hopper’s former patients and their families. What they do know for certain is this: they had a doctor who was consistently and criminally dishonest.
“I just refuse to believe there weren’t hidden motives behind the operations he performed.”
The surgeon who operated on Faye’s mother wasn’t named in the inquest into her death. Even though Faye had met with him after Liz’s operation, she was never sure Hopper had done the amputation. When she recently contacted the Royal Cornwall hospital to check, she was told that, despite her clear memories of meeting him, there was “no record of Mr Hopper being involved at any stage” in Liz’s care.
In response to inquiries from the Guardian, the Royal Cornwall hospitals NHS trust says Liz’s medical records show Hopper wasn’t in the operating theatre for her leg amputation, and that the procedure only took three and a half hours – not the 11 or 12 hours Faye claims.
Faye has text messages she sent to family members during her mum’s surgery, telling them the operation was taking much longer than the five hours they’d originally expected. She says she clearly remembers calling the hospital repeatedly during the surgery to ask why her mother still hadn’t come out, and being told by staff that her mother’s confused state was because the procedure had been so long.
“I just don’t seem to get anything back from the hospital that’s accurate,” Faye sighs. “Things happened that I know for a fact happened. I know I met Neil Hopper. I know he was involved in my mum’s care. I don’t know whether he’s just lied and covered his tracks, and so the hospital is going by what they’ve got.”
“He may well have been involved – he just may not have written anything down,” says Bird. “He lied to his medical colleagues. The records he did make – why would they be reliable? They were written by a proven liar.” That’s another reason, Bird says, why any review of Hopper’s work that relies only on medical notes isn’t good enough.
Hopper was told he must serve at least 40% of his sentence, so he’ll be eligible for release from prison within the next few months. The criminal trial only dealt with the charges he could be prosecuted for – fraud and possession of extreme pornography – not the deception of colleagues, patients, and his wife and children, nor the psychological harm he’s caused to the people who trusted him with their lives and bodies. While these things are deeply wrong, they aren’t necessarily crimes.
“He hasn’t been punished for what he’s done to patients,” says Faye. “I just refuse to believe there weren’t hidden motives behind the operations he carried out.” The ongoing doubts have made it harder for her to grieve, she says. She wants to put her mother’s pictures on the walls, but can’t face going through Liz’s old photographs, which remain in a box in Faye’s loft.
Faye wants the trust to set up an independent inquiry into Hopper, looking not only at whether amputations he performed were unnecessary, but also at his behaviour during operations – whether procedures were dragged out, prolonged, or otherwise carried out inappropriately. “It’s horrific that there hasn’t been an independent audit from NHS England or the Royal College of Surgeons. Why hasn’t there been a full independent inquiry?”
When we first met, Faye had been unsure whether to speak out about what happened to her mother. She’d worried that, if Liz’s wider family and manMy friends would be horrified if they read about her connection to Hopper. “I don’t want them to go through what I’ve been through,” she had said. But then she thought about what Liz would want. “She cared about fairness and justice, and making sure people faced up to things. If she were alive today, I know what she would say. She’d say, ‘Go get that effing bastard.'”
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the scenario you provided The questions are phrased in a natural curious tone and the answers are direct and factual where possible while acknowledging the emotional and ethical nuances of the story
General Background Questions
Q Wait is this a real story A surgeon actually amputated his own legs
A Yes this is based on a real case Dr Robert Smith a Scottish surgeon had both of his healthy legs amputated in 2000 He was a wellregarded surgeon before this but he had a condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder and a related fetish
Q What is Body Integrity Identity Disorder
A Its a rare psychological condition where a person feels that a part of their body doesnt belong to them This causes intense distress and they often seek to have that limb amputated to feel whole and at peace
Q Why did he do it if he was a surgeon Couldnt he just not do it
A For people with BIID the urge is overwhelming and constant Its not a casual desire its a deepseated neurological and psychological mismatch He felt his legs were foreign objects and the compulsion to remove them was so strong that he resorted to selfsurgery
Questions About Patient Safety
Q This is terrifying Were his patients actually in danger
A Based on the official investigation no The General Medical Council in the UK investigated him and found no evidence that his personal condition affected his clinical judgment or his ability to perform surgery on his patients He was considered a competent and safe surgeon
Q How can I trust that If he had a fetish for cutting off legs how did he not take it out on his patients
A Thats a very natural fear However the fetish and the BIID are directed at his own body not others There is a distinction between a personal compulsion and a professional skill He reportedly maintained a strict professional boundary
Q Did he ever operate on patients legs unnecessarily because of his condition
