Lennox Ross Broster was born in South Africa in 1889, and received his early education at St Andrew's College and the Rhodes University College (now Rhodes University), Grahamstown, Cape Province. Elected to a Rhodes Scholarship in 1909, he entered Trinity College, Oxford, to study medicine, and from there went on to Guy's Hospital for his clinical training, graduating BM BCh in 1914. While at Oxford he held the appointment of lecturer and demonstrator in anatomy. He served in the RAMC in the first world war and was with the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders until 1918, first with the 44th Field Ambulance, then as Deputy Assistant Director of Medical Services in charge of the medical administration of the Tank Corps with the rank of Major. He was twice mentioned in dispatches, and in the 1919 Birthday Honours was appointed OBE. He proceeded to the DM in 1919 and the MCh in 1922; he was admitted a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1921. Broster decided to stay in England to pursue a surgical career. His immediate post-graduate appointments included those of house-surgeon at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, surgical officer to out-patients at Guy's Hospital, and surgical registrar at Charing Cross Hospital. In 1922 he became assistant surgeon at the Queen's Hospital for Children, Hackney Road, and in the following year obtained a similar appointment at Charing Cross Hospital. Although his active connexion with the Queen's Hospital for Children, to which he became a full surgeon in 1927, ended in 1930, he maintained his association with Charing Cross Hospital, where he attained the status of full surgeon in 1933, continuing as consulting surgeon to the end of his life. For some 30 years he was consulting surgeon to the Bute Hospital, Luton, acting in a similar capacity to Chesham Cottage Hospital, Dunstable Hospital, and Beckenham Hospital, and to the Church Army. He had been examiner in clinical surgery for the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Leeds, and a former chairman of the Court of Examiners of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and examiner in clinical pathology for the College. He was a Huntarian Professor of the College in 1934, when he discussed the adrenogenital syndrome. Broster had been a member of Council and one of the Honorary Secretaries of the Royal Society of Medicine, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Society in 1958. In 1936 Broster toured the United States and Canada, delivering lectures on the adrenal gland, and in the following year gave the Mayo Foundation Lecture at Rochester, Minnesota. In 1941 the American Surgical Association invited him to deliver a lecture on war surgery at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and in 1942 elected him an Honorary Fellow. In 1940 he delivered a William Withering Lecture at Birmingham University. In 1948 he toured South Africa at the invitation of the South African Medical Association, and in 1950 he acted as visiting professor of surgery in the University of Cairo. Broster gave a good deal of his time to the furtherance of the aims of the British Medical Association. In 1938 he succeeded Dr W Watkins-Pitchford as the representative of the South African Branches on the Council of the Association. He remained a member of the Council until the end of the 1945-6 session, when the Medical Association of South Africa was formed as an independent entity, affiliated to the BMA. In October 1954 the Medical Association of South Africa awarded him its Bronze Medal for his great services to the medical profession in that country. When the British Medical Association held its Annual Meeting at Manchester in 1929 he acted as one of the honorary secretaries of the Section of Surgery, and at Liverpool in 1950 he was a Vice-President of the Section. He became chairman of the committee of management of the Empire (now Commonwealth) Medical Advisory Bureau and International Medical Visitors' Bureau in 1950, in succession to Sir Hugh Lett. Broster was formerly a governor of London House and of the Sister Trust, and a member of the management committee of the Dominion Students Hall Trust to which he left a generous legacy. He also served on the council and the academic council of the British Postgraduate Medical Federation and on the management committee of the Postgraduate Medical School of London at Hammersmith. Broster was a rugby football blue at Oxford, and in later life became president of the United Hospitals Rugby Football Club. He was also a keen golfer. He married in 1916 Edith M V Thomas. He had paid particular attention to the disorders associated with tumours of the adrenal glands. This group of diseases includes masculinization in women and other types of intersexuality, and many sufferers from these distressing conditions were restored to normality by operative treatment at Broster's hands. Apart from his achievements in the surgery of the ductless glands he was a sound general surgeon, and he had taken a prominent part in the affairs of the medical institutions of London. Broster retired in 1954 to Soulbury, near Leighton Buzzard, but soon suffered a slight stroke from which he made a good recovery. He died at his home after a short illness on 12 April 1965, survived by his wife and their three daughters. Publications: *The adrenal cortex*, with H W C Vines. 1933. *The adrenal cortex and intersexuality*. 1938. *Endocrine man*. 1944.