John Ronald Brown - Later Medical Career

Later Medical Career

By the early 1970s, Brown was carrying out sex reassignment surgery on transsexual patients at a small clinic he'd set up in San Francisco. He would later claim to have performed 600 such surgeries during the course of his career. Most of his patients were transsexual people who were too poor to afford the fees of reputable surgeons. Others were former patients of the university based units at Stanford University and Johns Hopkins Hospital that offered transsexual treatment during the 1960s. Only a small minority of patients met their exceptionally strict criteria for sex reassignment surgery. The programme at Johns Hopkins, for example, only approved surgery for 24 out of the first 2000 people who approached them with the request for it. Brown, by contrast, freely admitted that he was willing to operate on anybody who would pay him.

In 1977, following the death of one patient and a law suit from another, Brown's medical license was revoked by the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance for "gross negligence, incompetence and practicing unprofessional medicine in a manner which involved moral turpitude". The charge of gross negligence was based on his practice of carrying out sex reassignment surgery in his office on an out-patient basis, rather than in a fully equipped surgical theatre. He was also charged with allowing patients to work as unqualified, medical assistants (allegedly as barter for their own subsequent surgery), failing to hospitalize a patient who had developed a life-threatening infection and making false claims on medical insurance forms. Brown continued to practice medicine outside of California, but was successively barred from practicing in Hawaii, Alaska and the island of Saint Lucia.

During the 1980s Brown began soliciting and advertising surgical services in the USA. whilst performing the surgical procedures in Mexico. In 1986, an article in the magazine Forum reported on his procedure for surgically increasing penis length. The Forum article and an Inside Edition television documentary made several years later ("The Worst Doctor in America") both portrayed Brown as an incompetent and inept surgeon. While some of his patients were satisfied with their surgical results and praised Brown, he gained an overall poor reputation and the nickname "Butcher Brown" amongst the transsexual community. Despite this, desperate individuals continued to seek him out.

In 1990, Brown spent 19 months in prison for practising medicine without a license. The charge came after Brown operated on a thirty-year-old male-to-female transsexual from Orange County, California . After leaving prison, Brown worked as a taxi driver for a year before re-establishing himself in medical practice.