Sir Raymond Hoffenberg

Raymond Hoffenberg, endocrinologist and medical scientist: born Port Elizabeth, South Africa 16 March 1923; Senior Lecturer, Department of Medicine, University of Cape Town 1955-67; Senior Scientist, MRC 1968-72; William Withering Professor of Medicine, Birmingham University 1972-85; President, Royal College of Physicians 1983-89; KBE 1984; President, Wolfson College, Oxford 1985-93; Professor of Medical Ethics, University of Queensland 1993-95; married 1949 Margaret Rosenberg (died 2005; two sons), 2006 Gräfin Madeleine Douglas; died Oxford 22 April 2007.

Raymond Hoffenberg's concern for medical ethics and the rights and duties of doctors was born in his native South Africa, where, until his forced departure for Britain in 1968, he was prominent among the opponents of white racial oppression. He was to achieve a high reputation in his field of medicine, endocrinology, and in academic life - serving as President of the Royal College of Physicians from 1983 to 1989, and of Wolfson College, 1985-93.

From exceptionally brilliant - at work and games - schooldays in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, "Bill" Hoffenberg was accepted by the University of Cape Town to read Medicine at only 16. He joined the Union Defence Force at 18, in 1942, and served in the ranks in North Africa and Italy, returning to Cape Town to complete his MB ChB degrees in 1948. After internship at the recently founded Groote Schuur Hospital and a junior lectureship in the University of Cape Town Medical School, he rose to senior status at the latter and was working as a physician at Groote Schuur by 1955.

His experience was widened with a period of service under Albert Schweitzer at Lambaréné in Gabon (then French Equatorial Africa) in the interim. He had married Margaret Rosenberg in 1949 and their home in Newlands was visited by many friends and colleagues, their circle much extended after his Carnegie Fellowship travels in the United States in 1957-58. These were the days of his early specialisation in endocrinology.

Hoffenberg's primary political loyalty lay always with Alan Paton's Liberal Party, to the chairman of which, Peter Brown, he had been especially close since their days as ex-service students in Cape Town, as he was to Paton himself. His greatest influence was probably with the Liberal-led National Union of South African Students, to whose officers he gave warm support, as a member of the NUSAS advisory panel. It was Prime Minister John Vorster who, convinced of Hoffenberg's effectiveness, banned him in July 1967 from all political and social activity, permitting him to continue his work only until the end of 1967. There was a national outcry at "the Hoffenberg ban", with demonstrations, protests and petitions, many from groups of leading medical men abroad.

Finally, a meeting of the Chancellor of the university, Harry Oppenheimer, and the head of the medical school, Dr J.F. Brock, with the minister achieved no result. Hoffenberg himself was told only that his work for the committee funding political defendants and aiding their families, the Defence and Aid Fund (he was the internal chairman until it, too, was banned in 1966), was among the reasons for his ban. The Hoffenbergs left South Africa on a one-way "exit permit" in 1968. The Liberal Party itself came to an end the same year, when all multiracial political activity was outlawed.

In exile, Hoffenberg continued his work for the campaign against apartheid, speaking, writing and giving his name for the cause, but his medical career entered a new, upward phase. In 1972, after four years as a senior scientist in the Medical Research Council in London, and in the thyroid clinic at New End Hospital in Hampstead, continuing his work on thyroid disorders which he had begun in Cape Town, he was offered the William Withering chair of medicine at Birmingham University, serving there until 1985. Professor David London, formerly of Birmingham University, says that at Birmingham he developed an endocrine department "of international standing" and also expanded the Medical School by initiating the establishment of chairs in other medical departments:

His particular talents, which were very considerable, lay within the clear sense of direction he was able to impart to those with whom he worked, his charm and articulacy, coupled with a steely determination to achieve his wished-for ends. The immediate verdict on the Hoffenberg era in Birmingham was that it was highly successful.

London recalls that, during Hoffenberg's presidency of the Royal College, in the current National Health Service crisis, "as a display of his characteristic political courage, he was a co-signatory of a letter to The Times [which] resulted in a summons to visit the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to discuss what should be done". He did not win the argument that followed and "an untried system of an internal market as proposed as an academic exercise by an American health economist, was introduced - the system from which many of our current ills stem".

"In his time, the Royal College was a power in the medical land and he was a giant of his day," says London, not least through his being "a practised diplomat and at ease in the corridors of power [who] was never afraid to use the tools of modern politics".

As a medical scientist, his research and administrative gifts brought him the presidency of the International Society for Endocrinology and the chairmanship of the British Heart Foundation and of the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear War (a cause he had championed since his South African days). He delivered and published many papers on endocrinology and metabolism.

With retirement, their two sons having settled in Australia, the Hoffenbergs migrated to Queensland, where Bill Hoffenberg became Professor of Medical Ethics in the University of Queensland until 1995. In the 1990s and the current decade he revisited South Africa many times, reporting on the country's medical schools to the ANC government at their request, and in England he cared for the ANC President Oliver Tambo, his patient for many years in exile. He made a final visit to South Africa last month.

Randolph Vigne