Positions Broster held junior surgical positions at a number of hospitals, including those of house-surgeon at the
Radcliffe Infirmary and surgical officer to out-patients at
Guy's Hospital. He also worked at the
Queen's Hospital for Children, as an assistant surgeon beginning in 1922 and a full surgeon from 1927 to 1930. Although employed as a
General Surgeon, he took a special interest in
endocrinology. The condition was known at the time as "adreno-genital syndrome", although the term now used is
congenital adrenal hyperplasia. As part of this work, Broster devised a new method for adrenalectomy which he reported in a 1932 paper. At the time, operations of this type often involved
resection of a rib so that the surgeon could gain access to the
adrenal gland. In Broster's less destructive technique, a long, oblique
incision was made over the rib that covered the adrenal gland and the rib was fractured, allowing the incision to be continued through the
parietal pleura. The
diaphragm was then divided, giving access to the gland. 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. This attracted considerable press attention to Broster and Charing Cross during the 1930s; a 1938 story in the
News of the World described Broster as "the famous surgeon, who has brought new hope and happiness into the baffled lives of many men and women who were desirous of changing their sex". Although journalists often described the treatment as sex changing (as in the preceding quotation), the patients they wrote about would more accurately be described as
intersex rather than
transsexual, In 1936 it was reported that he had received two operations at Charing Cross Hospital from Broster, 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. In 1948 the
South African Medical Association invited him to lecture in South Africa, and in 1950 he was a visiting professor of surgery at
Cairo University. Broster became one of the Section's two vice-presidents and then president after the death of the post's initial holder,
Walter Langdon-Brown. In 1950 Broster became chairman of the
Commonwealth Medical Advisory Bureau's committee of management. In 1952 he became chair of a committee, set up jointly by the Royal Society of Medicine's Section of Endocrinology and the
Society for Endocrinology, which had the task of considering how British research in endocrinology could be encouraged. He was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1958. ==Family==