Lennox Ross Broster, OBE (1889 – 12 April 1965) was a South African-born surgeon who spent most of his career as a consultant at Charing Cross Hospital, London.
He served with the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I, for which he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1909 Broster received a Rhodes Scholarship and began studying medicine at Trinity College, Oxford.
[1][2] In 1927 a colleague at Charing Cross Hospital, the neurologist Gordon Holmes, received a fifteen-year-old female patient experiencing virilisation.
Holmes was familiar with a similar case that had been treated by surgical removal of an adrenocortical adenoma (a tumour of the adrenal cortex), and he asked Broster to operate on the new patient.
At the time, operations of this type often involved resection of a rib so that the surgeon could gain access to the adrenal gland.
[14][15] In the 1930s and 1940s Broster not only continued to work on congenital adrenal hyperplasia, but also provided surgical and hormonal treatment to intersex patients more generally, in collaboration with the psychiatrist Clifford Allen.
[17][19] In 1936 it was reported that he had received two operations at Charing Cross Hospital from Broster,[17] who stated "that Mark Weston, who has always been brought up as a female, is a male and should continue to live as such".
[19] World War II interrupted the work of Broster's team, but he used the additional time available to write his book Endocrine Man (1944), which he intended to present his research to laypeople in the belief that "looming on the horizon are issues fraught with important consequences that will require the finest weaving in the fabric of our social structure".
[20] In the 1950s Broster's work was taken up by John Randell, another surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital, who provided sex reassignment surgery to several hundred transsexuals during his career.
[16] The Royal College of Surgeons of England elected Broster as a Hunterian Professor for 1934, and he fulfilled this role with a lecture on "Surgery of the Adrenal".
Greene and Broster had to contend with opposition to the creation of a new medical specialism and with doubts about the scientific basis of endocrinology.
[3][7] Their eldest daughter Cynthia also became a physician and finished her career as principal medical officer for the Oxfordshire Area Health Authority.
[27] Broster suffered a stroke after retiring from Charing Cross Hospital, when about to sit down at Lord's Cricket Ground to watch a match.