A French medicine student has gone viral on TikTok and amassed an army of followers after he started creating videos showing him performing surgical operations with pinpoint precision on fruit and veg.

It is well known that surgeons often practice complex procedures on fruit but Robin Goncet has taken this one step further by drawing faces on them, creating a narrative, and filling their insides with the organs that he wants to operate on.

Speaking to Newsflash in an exclusive interview from his university flat in the French city of Grenoble, in the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region in south-eastern France, the 24-year-old student, who is in his sixth year of medicine studies at Grenoble University, said that once he has conducted his primary incision, he stops the video to remove the insides of the fruit and replace them with whatever ‘organs’ he plans to operate on.

He then starts the video again and peeling back the outside layer of the fruit or vegetable he is operating on, the viewer then sees the ‘organs’ inside as he operates on them.

Part entertainment and part educational, his videos have taken off like wildfire on TikTok, earning him over 250,000 followers and millions of views since he started posting them at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when he was in lockdown.

One video – which currently has nearly 2 million views on his TikTok account – shows Goncet, who has not yet officially chosen his speciality but who wants to become a surgeon, operating on an aubergine (or eggplant) called ‘Timothy’ to fix a testicular torsion issue. Testicular torsion is when a man’s testicle rotates on itself resulting in the spermatic cord becoming twisted.

This in turn reduces blood flow to the scrotum and can cause serious pain and swelling.

Another video shows him performing a C-section on ‘Marie’, a grapefruit, to deliver her ‘baby’. Goncet explains every step of the procedure as he is doing it, making the videos compelling viewing for other medicine students or simply people aspiring to study medicine at university.

But they have also proved entertaining for netizens at large, with many commenting that they find them funny, entertaining and often instructive as well. Goncet said: “Not everyone has been operated on, so these videos give insights to people who know little about that world.”

Goncet said that he had never planned to undertake a career in medicine, despite being interested in science at school. But he explained that when he was 15, he saw how a laboratory worked and how human blood was processed and, realising how complicated and interesting it all was, he started studying medicine when he left high school.

He started posting videos on TikTok shortly after the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic when France went into its first lockdown.

He explained that he had been taking part in a hand surgery at Grenoble hospital, as advanced medicine students in France work in different departments in hospitals for three-month periods to gain experience and mentorship.

After the operation, he wanted to practice, so like many other surgeons, he decided to ‘operate’ on some fruit. And having just signed up to TikTok to have something to do during lockdown, he decided to post a video.

He was not expecting such a response from netizens and said that “it was a nice surprise, it is fantastic”, adding that he “still doesn’t fully realise that millions of people have seen these.”

He said that starting out with posting videos online, he was doing it “for fun” and “not very seriously”, with humour and even a “burlesque” side to it.

But after his first videos became successful, he decided that showing how to do complicated surgeries or lesser-known operations, all the while explaining how they were done, was the way to go. Based on the number of uses videos have notched up, it appears that he was right.