Martin Kelly: The face of compassion

The operating theatre where Martin Kelly found himself one winter's day 10 years ago was not the usual set-up for one of Britain's leading plastic surgeons. As he carried out complex and delicate recontructive work, his assistants were dressed in several jumpers to protect themselves from the bitter cold and the sole source of light was a large hole in the wall left by a Soviet mortar bomb.

His surgery to rebuild the faces of people maimed by the Taliban, whose range of barbaric punishments included severing the noses of those believed to be liars, was being carried out in the rudimentary surroundings of the main hospital in Kabul in the depths of a bitter winter in 1998. It was a time, prior to the 9/11 attacks, when the plight of Afghanistan and its people was not an international priority.

Mr Kelly was still in the early stages of his career as a craniofacial specialist but was already considered to be one of the most talented surgeons of his generation. He could easily have stayed in London, where his work with the NHS was combined with a private practice close to Harley Street carrying out "a lot of rhinoplasty and facelifts and things" for celebrities and the merely moneyed.

That ascent to the top of the medical profession was cut short brutally on Tuesday this week when the 43-year-old surgeon, an ultra-healthy individual who counted distance running among his many sporting pastimes, collapsed on the doorstep of his home after returning from performing surgery at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in west London. A post-mortem examination yesterday confirmed that he had died suddenly from a condition called dilated cardiomyopathy, which causes the walls of the heart to become stretched and weakened.

Newspaper headlines about the tragedy declared Mr Kelly, who invented a new method of nose reconstruction, to have been the "plastic surgeon to the stars" and the "King of Rhinoplasty". But few have paid much attention to the more complicated and impassioned individual behind the glib headlines.

A decade ago, when he was 33, the surgeon was at a point where few would have blamed him for resting a little on his laurels and enjoying his occasional appearance in the diary columns. Six months earlier the one-time male model had married the British actress Natascha McElhone; he was publishing the latest of 30 research papers and was setting up home in a Georgian townhouse in a fashionable corner of west London.

But when he was asked by a small medical charity to help burns victims and patients with facial deformities, it was a measure of the high-flying surgeon in an area of medicine so often criticised for profiting from human vanity that he did not think twice about swapping Fulham for the battle-scarred streets of Kabul. The city's general hospital was beyond basic: such was the shortage of disposable surgical gloves that the staff would wash them and dry them out for re-use, the medicine cupboard contained just five boxes of useless pills and a generator provided electric light for five hours a day, meaning that the medical team would start work at dawn to maximise the daylight pouring through the hole caused by a Soviet barrage during the Eighties. Mr Kelly described the hole as his "present from the Russians" because it extended the amount of time he could carry out his surgery.

It was during this time that the French-born surgeon first met Hadisa Husain. Wrapped in a bundle of blankets carried by her father, Sardar, a baker from Kabul, Hadisa was born with a full facial cleft, where the bones of her skull had failed to fuse in the womb and left her brain pushing out from a face that was without a nose and with a left eye obscured by folds of misplaced flesh. Nothing could be done in the developing world conditions of the hospital. But when a translator told Mr Kelly that Hadisa had been labelled a "devil child" in her community and the Taliban was preparing to have her stoned to death, he saw it as his personal responsibility to raise the funds for the 18-month-old child to be flown to Britain and operated on by colleagues, including Norman Waterhouse, the surgeon who will carry out the first face transplant in the UK.

The project led to the foundation of Facing the World, the charity set up by Mr Kelly and Mr Waterhouse to bring children with severe disfigurements from the developing world for treatment in Britain.

Sarah Driver-Jowitt, the charity's executive co-ordinator, and until recently sole employee, said yesterday: "Martin had a passion for the forgotten. He was driven by the thought that the accident of the country in which you were born should not deprive you of the opportunity to have the best treatment if you had a facial disfigurement. When he met Hadisa, he tried to explain to the father that he needed the full infrastructure of First World hospital – neurosurgeons, specialists, an intensive care unit – to do something. The translator said he did not understand and explained that the Taliban want to put her to death. Condemning a child like that was not something he could do. He contacted Norman and they raised the money to bring Hadisa to Britain."

What followed was the first of three sets of surgery which have transformed Hadisa from an object of murderous superstition into a smiling schoolgirl who writes letters to her doctors in English. She was the first of what has since become 16 children, all of them with extreme disfigurements, who have been brought to Britain for treatment by the charity's team of medical experts, who now number 25 and offer their time and services free of charge.

Mr Kelly, who was educated in Paris and at Winchester College before doing his medical training at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, was filmed by a Channel 4 documentary crew in 2006 working with several patients, including Arianto, an Indonesian boy with a 1.6kg tumour on his face that had destroyed much of his jaw, his left eye and many of his teeth. He said: "You assume that the progress of a child born like this will always be restrained. But it's not – it seems to be a problem of adjustment. If you make these kids look normal, or half-way normal, it opens up their world ... It's just like opening up the shutters on a dark house."

It is easily assumed that such laudable work would sit uncomfortably with a lucrative business performing breast enhancements, face lifts and rebuilding the cocaine-damaged septums of socialites. Among the celebrity patients who Mr Kelly treated were Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who underwent nose surgery to correct damage caused by her cocaine addiction.

But the surgeon was robustly unapologetic about the glitzier end of his work. Friends said he treated all his work with the same seriousness and considered his patients to be on a single scale. "You have to pay your mortgage somehow. But that's not just why I do it – I enjoy the finesse of it," he told a newspaper two years ago.

Indeed, mental and physical dexterity seem to have motivated him throughout the public and private spheres of his life. When not supervising PhD students, overseeing the work of Facing the World and meeting his commitments as a consultant at two NHS teaching hospitals, he played drums and bass in a band entirely composed of other plastic surgeons and consequently entitled Tuck That, and painted in a studio on the top floor of the £2.5m family home. Born to a French father and an English mother, he changed his surname from Hirgoyen to his mother's maiden name after moving to Britain.

Roy Greenslade, the media commentator and step-father of Ms McElhone, said: "He was truly a magnificent man as a surgeon, as a father, as a husband. As well as being a brilliant doctor, he painted, he wrote his own music as well as being a great sportsman. He was just terrific and a true Renaissance man."

Ms McElhone, 36, was expected to return from Los Angeles last night with her sons, Theo, eight, and Otis, four. She had been filming the hit television series Californication. The actress, who is pregnant with the couple's third child, was said by a friend to be "completely devastated".

The couple first met when she was 15 and he was a 21-year-old medical student who was also doing some modelling work. It was far from love at first sight – Ms McElhone dismissed the guitar-playing medic as a "party boy". But when they met again 10 years later, romance blossomed and they married in a Romanesque church in St Remy, southern France. Mr Greenslade said the couple had an exceptionally warm and close marriage.

Kris Thykier, a film producer and former partner in the leading PR firm Freud Communications, who was a close friend of Mr Kelly and shared a flat with him throughout the 1990s, said: "He sounds like the sort of guy you would want to hate for just being so talented and intelligent. But he genuinely wore it lightly and was always looking to undercut himself. He combined great seriousness with great fun and incredible creativity. It is just so cruel that he should have died so much before his time."

Friends confirmed yesterday that it was possible the surgeon's heart condition was hereditary. Three members of his family are known to have died prematurely from cardiac arrests. Cardiomyopathy leaves the heart unable to pump blood efficiently, creating problems such as irregular heart rhythms, blood clots and heart failure in young and apparently fit people. The decreased heart function can affect the lungs, liver, and other body systems.

A private funeral is expected to be held in the coming days, after which his fellow surgeons have vowed to continue the work considered by Mr Kelly to be his most important achievement. He often pointed to a letter from Hadisa Husain as summing up what he aimed to do with his career. Misspelling her doctor's name, Hadisa, now 11, said: "First of all I say hallow to my doctor Moten Kalli. I'm Hadisa Husain from Afghanistan. I'm at school now and I'm very happy. I don't have any problem and I'll never forget you, and I'm waithing for my next opration. Thank you."