John Ronald Brown (July 14, 1922 – May 16, 2010) was an American surgeon who was convicted of second-degree murder after the death of a 79-year-old patient in his care. Early life The son of a physician, Dr. Brown was born in 1922. He did well in school, graduating from high school by the age of 16. When drafted by the US Army during World War II, he scored exceptionally highly on the Army General Classification Test, which resulted in the Army sending him to medical school. Brown graduated from University of Utah School of Medicine in 1947, and worked as a general practitioner for almost two decades. However, after almost losing a patient during a thyroidectomy, he decided to undertake formal surgical training. Despite excelling in the written aspects of certification for the American Board of Plastic Surgery, he failed the oral assessment (blaming his 'domineering' father). Later medical career By the early 1970s, Brown was carrying out gender-affirming surgery on transgender patients at a small clinic he set up in San Francisco. He would later claim to have performed 600 such surgeries during the course of his career. Only a small minority of patients met their exceptionally strict criteria for gender-affirming surgery. The program 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. His lack of a formal surgical qualification made it necessary for him to carry out gender-affirming procedures in his office on an out-patient basis, rather than in a fully equipped surgical theatre. He also operated on patients in motel rooms, and his own garage. In 1977, following the death of one patient and a lawsuit from another, Brown's medical license was revoked by the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance for "gross negligence, incompetence and practicing unprofessional medicine in a manner which involved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". 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