While You Were Under: Doctors Behaving Badly

The Surgeon Who Signed His Work — The Showmen · Birmingham, 2013–2022

Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

Simon Bramhall was a liver transplant surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham — a man at the summit of one of the most demanding specialties in medicine. Using an argon beam coagulator, an instrument for sealing bleeding tissue, he burned his initials, S B, into the transplanted livers of two unconscious patients. He did it in front of colleagues. A nurse who questioned him was told: "I do this." The marks came to light only because another surgeon opened one of the patients for a follow-up procedure and found the monogram. Bramhall pleaded guilty to two counts of common assault, was fined £10,000 with a twelve-month community order, and was struck off the medical register in January 2022. At tribunal he described his own conduct as "professional arrogance of such magnitude that it strayed into criminal behaviour." He has since taken to writing novels.

The verdict: The self-diagnosis was the most accurate thing he did in that theatre. Note what it took to catch him: not the nurse who asked, not the colleagues who watched, but a second surgeon opening the same patient months later. The organ had to be looked at twice.

The Plastic Surgeon Who Took Questions From the Audience Mid-Operation — The Showmen · Ohio, 2018–2023

Jacques Gondouin / Claude-René-Gabriel Poulleau via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

Katharine Roxanne Grawe practised as "Dr. Roxy," a plastic surgeon with more than 800,000 TikTok followers, and she livestreamed portions of her operations — speaking to camera and answering viewers' questions while operating. The Ohio State Medical Board permanently revoked her licence in July 2023 and fined her $4,500, after three patients suffered complications. One woman's intestine was found perforated a week after a procedure Grawe had partly livestreamed; the resulting abdominal infection led to a loss of brain function from toxins in her blood. Grawe's stated justification was that she loved teaching and wanted to explain cosmetic surgery to the public.

The verdict: Every performer needs an audience that cannot leave, and she had found the only one in the world that also cannot object, cannot look away, and cannot later dispute the edit. The defence — that it was education — is the giveaway. Teaching does not require the student to be unconscious on the table.

The Dermatologist Who Danced — The Showmen · Georgia, 2016–2018

Windell Davis-Boutté, a dermatologist in Lilburn, Georgia, posted more than twenty videos of herself singing and dancing in the operating room, as marketing for the practice, while patients lay immobile and frequently exposed. At least seven women sued. Icilma Cornelius, fifty-four, went into cardiac arrest during a 2016 liposuction and suffered permanent brain damage. The Georgia Composite Medical Board suspended her licence; separately she was ordered to pay roughly $190,000 to thirty-eight patients who had paid in full for procedures they never received. WSB-TV later reported she was working in another state under the name Catherine Davis.

The verdict: The videos were not a lapse in judgement made in private and later regretted. They were the advertising. She filmed them deliberately, edited them, and published them to attract the next patient — which means that at no point in the process did anyone in that practice look at the footage and see anything wrong.

The Surgeon Who Attended Traffic Court From the Operating Room — The Showmen · Sacramento, February 2021

Honoré Daumier via Wikimedia Commons (CC0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

Dr. Scott Green, a Sacramento plastic surgeon, appeared by video link for a traffic court hearing while in an operating room with a patient. The hearing was livestreamed. The clerk, and then Court Commissioner Gary Link, observed that Green was in scrubs, that medical equipment was beeping behind him, and that he appeared to be operating. Asked directly, Green confirmed he was in surgery and said another surgeon was present who could continue. Commissioner Link declined to proceed, citing the patient's welfare, and postponed the hearing to a date when Green would not be operating. The Medical Board of California said it would investigate, stating that it "expects physicians to follow the standard of care when treating their patients." Green afterwards said he had completed the salient portion of the operation, that a licensed fellow was performing the closing, and that delays that day had caused the overlap; he maintained that neither patient safety nor privacy was compromised.

The verdict: Take his account entirely at face value — the fellow was closing, the patient was fine — and the folly survives intact. A judge looked at a man standing over an open patient and decided that the traffic ticket could wait. The doctor had reached the opposite conclusion, and had to be told.

The Pharmacist Who Spent Forty Years Being Somebody Else — The Impostors · California, 1976–2018

Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

Gerald Barnbaum was a licensed pharmacist until 1976, when his licence was revoked over federal Medicaid fraud charges. That same year he legally changed his name to Gerald Barnes — the name of a real orthopaedic surgeon — and began practising medicine on the strength of the stolen identity and forged credentials. In 1981 he pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and practising without a licence, in connection with the death of John Alfred McKenzie, twenty-nine, whose severe diabetic symptoms he had dismissed; McKenzie died two days later. Barnbaum served eighteen months. He was convicted again in 1984, again in 1989, and in 1996 pleaded guilty to federal charges after impersonating a doctor at clinics whose patients included FBI agents — twelve and a half years. He escaped while on furlough in 2000, resumed practising as a physician, and in 2003 pleaded guilty for the fifth time. He died in federal prison in 2018, aged eighty-four.

The verdict: Five convictions for the same offence is not a man who made a mistake; it is a man with a vocation. The detail that should worry the reader is not the forgery but the durability: the machinery of professional verification failed to notice him across four decades, two identities and one prison escape.

The Surgeon Who Reported Himself to the Police — The Impostors · Uttar Pradesh, 2009–2019

Om Pal, fifty, worked as a surgeon at the community health centre in Deoband, Saharanpur district, for more than a decade, and claimed to have performed thousands of operations. He had obtained the contract post by cloning the MBBS degree of a Mysore University graduate, Dr Rajesh R, and affixing his own photograph to it. On the strength of that document he registered as a medical practitioner in Uttar Pradesh, ran a private nursing home on the side, and accumulated further certificates and diplomas in surgery, two of them American. Because Deoband is a small town where a borrowed south Indian name would attract notice, he used "Dr Rajesh Sharma" on his prescriptions and his signage while remaining "Dr Rajesh R" on the register. The deception ended when he received an extortion call and went to the police to complain about it.

The verdict: Ten years of forged credentials, thousands of operations, two names running in parallel — undone because the man decided he was the victim of a crime and wanted the authorities to do something about it. He had thought about everything except the possibility that he might one day need to be believed.

The Eighteen-Year-Old Who Opened a Practice — The Impostors · Florida, 2016–2022

Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

Malachi Love-Robinson opened the New Birth New Life Medical Center in West Palm Beach at eighteen, with no medical training, styling himself "Dr. Love." He took $30,000 from a patient in her eighties during house calls and $20,000 from an actual physician. In 2018 he pleaded guilty to fraud, grand theft, and practising medicine without a licence, and was released in 2019. Fifteen months after completing that sentence he was arrested again — theft of more than $10,000 from a Delray Beach shipping company — and sentenced to a further twenty-eight months.

The verdict: The second arrest is the informative one. A teenager persuading a Florida strip mall that he is a physician is a story about credulity; the same man returning to ordinary theft at twenty-five is a story about a person who was never really pretending to be a doctor at all. The white coat was a costume worn over an existing character.

The Star Surgeon and the Plastic Windpipes — The Impostors · Stockholm, 2011–2023

Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

Paolo Macchiarini was the Karolinska Institute's celebrated regenerative-medicine surgeon, and he implanted experimental synthetic tracheas into eight patients — three in Sweden, five in Russia. In June 2023 the Svea Court of Appeal convicted him on three counts of aggravated assault and sentenced him to two and a half years. The court found that two of the patients had not been in emergency situations and "could have lived for a not insignificant amount of time without the interventions"; the third was, but the procedure was "despite this, unjustifiable." Judge Maria Holcke: "These were not impulsive actions, these were planned interventions."

The verdict: The judge's sentence is the whole indictment, and it is aimed precisely where it belongs. An impulsive act is a failure of self-command. A planned intervention is a considered decision, taken calmly, in advance, by a man who had time to reconsider and did not.

The Bottle in the Paper-Towel Holder — The Impaired · Texas, 2025–2026 (indicted; not convicted)

Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

Azul Shirazali Jaffer, fifty, a plastic surgeon in Sugar Land, was indicted by a Fort Bend County grand jury on 15 December 2025 and arrested a week later on a felony charge of performing surgery while intoxicated. The indictment alleges he operated on a patient in August 2025 while drunk, exposing that patient to "substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm." The Texas Medical Board suspended his licence effective 30 December 2025, finding he posed "a continuing threat to public welfare." Board documents record seven occasions between 3 July and 12 August on which he is alleged to have arrived too impaired to operate, forcing staff to cancel surgeries — and state that on 9 July staff found a liquor bottle concealed inside a paper-towel holder in the men's bathroom. He has not been convicted, and the allegations remain allegations.

The verdict: Seven cancelled lists before anything happened. Whatever a court eventually concludes about this surgeon, the paper trail already convicts the building: the staff knew, the schedule knew, and the concealed bottle had a hiding place regular enough to be found.

The Registrar Who Blamed the Strikes — The Impaired · Warrington, 2023–2025

Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

Vivek Vatikutti, a surgical registrar at Warrington and Halton hospitals, arrived for his shift in September 2023 under the influence of alcohol. Colleagues smelled it on his breath during the surgical handover and he was removed from clinical practice immediately. He admitted drinking a substantial quantity of vodka the night before, and attributed it to stress and exhaustion from covering shifts during the junior doctors' strikes. The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service suspended him for nine months, finding that his conduct posed "a real risk to patient safety" and was of a kind that would "appall the public." He is no longer employed by the trust.

The verdict: The mitigation is more revealing than the offence. He was not disputing the vodka; he was explaining that the health service had driven him to it — which is to say that the man whose judgement was under examination responded by exercising it again, in public, on the record, and arriving at the conclusion that this was somebody else's fault.

The Anaesthetist Who Did Not Know the Phone Was Recording — The Contemptuous · Fairfax County, Virginia, 2013–2015

Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

A man preparing for a colonoscopy pressed record on his phone to capture his doctor's post-procedure instructions, and inadvertently recorded the entire operation. From the moment he went under, the surgical team mocked him. The anaesthetist, Tiffany Ingham, said: "After five minutes of talking to you in pre-op, I wanted to punch you in the face and man you up a little bit." She speculated that his rash was syphilis or tuberculosis, suggested he was gay, and discussed how to avoid him afterwards. She also entered a false diagnosis of haemorrhoids into his medical record, which was in fact done. A jury awarded him $500,000 — $100,000 for defamation, $200,000 for malpractice, $200,000 in punitive damages.

The verdict: Talk is talk, and a jury does not award punitive damages for talk. The falsified record is what elevates this from ugliness to something structural: she was willing to put a lie into the permanent medical history of a man she had just met, for no motive beyond the momentum of contempt. She believed she was alone in that room. She was, in every sense that mattered to her, and it changed how she behaved.

The Man the Hospitals Kept Passing Along — The Ego Surgeons · Texas, 2011–2017

Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

Christopher Duntsch, a Dallas neurosurgeon, operated on thirty-eight patients between 2011 and 2013. Thirty-three were left seriously injured; two died. He blamed the patients and he blamed the facilities. He emailed a colleague describing himself as "a stone cold killer." In 2017 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The part of the record that should be read twice is not his conduct but the profession's: as concerns accumulated, hospitals did not report him. They let him resign, and he moved on with his credentials and a transfer letter, and operated again.

The verdict: The blade does not point at the operating table here; it points at the paperwork. Every institution that chose the quiet exit over the formal report made a calculation — that a difficult disclosure was more costly to itself than an unreported surgeon was to whoever he met next. Each of them was individually correct, and the aggregate was a body count.

The Head Transplant That Was Always Two Years Away — The Ego Surgeons · Turin, 2015–2017

Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Illustrative only — not a depiction of any person named in this entry.

The Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero announced in 2015 that he would perform the world's first human head transplant by December 2017, under the names HEAVEN and GEMINI spinal cord fusion. A Russian computer scientist with a rare motor neurone disease publicly volunteered as the recipient. The operation on a living human never took place. In November 2017 Canavero announced instead that he had completed a head transplant between two cadavers in China, an eighteen-hour procedure, and supplied no evidence for it. The neurologist Jerry Silver said the polyethylene glycol technique on which the whole scheme rested was "light years away" from what was claimed. The bioethicist Arthur Caplan called the work "rotten scientifically and lousy ethically" and "a despicable fraud." No severed human spinal cord has ever been made to work again.

The verdict: He is the only man in this issue who harmed no patient, for the simple reason that he never operated on one. The announcement was the entire product — press conferences, a named volunteer, a deadline that moved, and finally two corpses in a room in China that nobody was permitted to examine. Vanity does not always need a body on the table. Sometimes it just needs a microphone and a date.