His grandfather, Benjamin Broomhall, had been the general secretary of the China Inland Mission for 20 years and had married Amelia, sister of the founder of the agency, James Hudson Taylor.

His uncle, Marshall Broomhall was the most famous of Benjamin's sons as a missionary and historian – a professional pattern repeated in Jim's life.

Undaunted, he and some fellow missionaries went to Hong Kong where they bought station wagons which they then drove through French Indochina and back over the Chinese border to Chongqing, Sichuan.

The couple began pioneering work among the Nosu tribe in 1943, they traveled among them giving medical aid and making friends.

In 1947 Jim finally arrived at the place he had dedicated his life to serve, a region in southwestern Sichuan where he could minister again to the Yi people.

Supported by British missionaries, Ruth Dix and Joan Wales, he opened a clinic to help the sick and to spread the Gospel at the same time.

In order to dispel the misunderstanding and fear the public had for people with leprosy, he invited a leper to live in his house for a year.

The villagers were so outraged that the leper would endanger Jim this way that they wanted to kill him, but his condition improved, although the irreversible damage could not be undone.

On one occasion he removed a young man's festering arm (it had been damaged in a dynamite explosion) and replaced it with an artificial limb, much to the joy of the boy's family.

Without even the aid of an x-ray machine, Jim performed two operations on a girl with a crippling bone disease and gave her a new life.

Broomhall's investigations as to whether the CIM could undertake medical work in Thailand led to three hospitals being founded there; also a pioneering missionary among the Mangyan people of the island of Mindoro in the Philippines for 11 years from 1953 until he retired.