Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/01/neil-hopper-surgeon-amputated-legs-fetish-extreme-mutilation-patients-questions Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.…

Neil Hopper was celebrated for continuing to do his job despite the loss of his lower limbs. But what the people he was treating didn’t know was that his injuries were self-inflicted. Now they and their families are asking questions Warning: this story contains graphic descriptions of bodily mutilation that some readers may find upsetting Of all the things that happened in the fraught days after 72-year-old Liz Spooner had her leg amputated at the Royal Cornwall hospital in Truro in 2022, one memory remains vivid in the mind of her daughter, Faye Harrison. Liz’s surgery had taken much longer than anticipated, Faye remembers, and, delirious after the anaesthetic and morphine, Liz had begun to refuse food and medication. That’s when Faye was ushered into a side room with a consultant surgeon. “He was smiley. He came across as quite charming and caring,” Faye recalls. He ran through a long list of the medications Liz was taking, and began explaining why she needed them. “I remember looking down – you look down at the floor a lot when you have these kinds of conversations – and I noticed he’d got metal sticks coming out of his trouser legs.” Faye blinks in disbelief at the memory. “I thought, blimey, he’s operated on my mum, but he’s also an amputee.” Neil Hopper was a celebrity in the world of vascular surgery – the specialist field involving veins and arteries, and therefore amputations. He had been a consultant for a decade by the time of Liz’s operation, and had received awards for clinical excellence. But in May 2019, following suspected sepsis, Hopper himself had had to undergo double below-the-knee amputations. When he walked into the surgical theatre on prosthetic legs in January 2020 ready to perform amputations on patients again, a BBC camera crew was there to film his heroic comeback. He talked about his experience of sepsis on the sofa of ITV’s This Morning, dressed in shorts that proudly exposed his prosthetics. Using the handle @bionicsurgeon, he had documented his experiences as a disabled doctor on social media. He even applied to the European Space Agency, hoping to be the world’s first astronaut with a disability. He won multiple accolades: 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: noting Hopper’s Welsh accent, she declared Cornwall’s beaches to be far better than Wales’s. It was an odd scenario, but there was at least something reassuring 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 harrowing few days for Liz’s family, but the ordeal had begun a year earlier, when she had fallen on the beach and broken 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 could 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. They were expecting the procedure to take five or six hours, but Faye tells me it took 11 or 12. 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; that she was being secretly filmed. “The nurses and doctors were saying this was normal after a very big anaesthetic and all the morphine. But she was never really out of that state. She was never my mum again, after that operation.” Liz contracted hospital-acquired pneumonia and, nine days after her surgery, she died.