Jean Ginsburg, who has died aged 77 of cancer, was one of a pioneering handful of postwar women doctors with a serious interest in women's health. In the 1960s her work on female subfertility put her at the forefront of gonadotrophin use, now crucial to IVF. She was also a clinical physiologist, expert on the circulation, and had a wide interest in hormone disorders. She got her male colleagues to take quantities of B vitamins so that they had hot flushes of memorable proportions, and they loved her in spite of it. She did all this despite being crippled by serious injuries sustained in a car crash, from which she never fully recovered.
She was appointed consultant endocrinologist at the Royal Free Hospital in 1966, whereupon she helped to establish the academic endocrinology department there and set up one of the first menopause clinics in Britain. Initially she was a physiologist, but after taking a research fellowship-cum-lectureship in obstetrics she became interested in women's health, which became her life's work.
Jean Ginsburg was the daughter of newly arrived Jewish political refugees from revolutionary Russia. Before the revolution her father, Naum Ginsburg, a civil engineer, had sheltered Trotsky in his home in St Petersburg when he was on the run from Tsarist troops. He was imprisoned for this. Her mother, Anya Bielenky, a pianist who had studied at the Conservatoire in St Petersburg and who came from a medical family, went with a purse full of money to a Bolshevik general and got her husband freed. Later, they fled to London, arriving in 1921.
Jean won scholarships to St Paul's girls' school and to Somerville College, Oxford, where she did her preclinical studies and took an honours degree in physiology. She was one of the first women to graduate from St Mary's Hospital medical school, London.
In 1954, two years after qualifying, she took a research fellowship in physiology and medicine at St Thomas's hospital. Here she worked in the Sherrington school of physiology; her main interest was the circulation and she was a pioneer of a technique called venous occlusion plethysmography. She and her colleagues would inject themselves, and medical student volunteers, with insulin to induce hypoglycaemia and, painfully, follow the effects on arterial blood flow.
In 1961 she became a research fellow and senior lecturer in the obstetrics department at Charing Cross hospital, where she developed the interest in women's health that determined her career.
She was the author of many research papers and wrote one book, The Circulation In The Female From The Cradle To The Grave (1989), and co-edited two more, Drug Therapy In Reproductive Endocrinology (1995) and Sex Steroids And The Circulatory System (1987). Age did not wither her zest for research, nor pregnancy interrupt it - she monitored her circulation for research purposes during her third labour, stopping only to be delivered of her daughter.
In 1968, only two years after she joined the Royal Free, she was injured in a car crash and spent three months in Paddington Green hospital. Though she was warned she would never walk again, she shuffled up and down stairs in a sitting position and eventually got back on her feet, though she always walked with a stick.
She never stopped working. Her most recent paper, a long-term follow-up of an anti-osteoporosis agent called tibolone, was published in March this year. At the end of her life, when she had kidney cancer, she would work from her hospital bed.
She was fiercely individualistic, sometimes irritating, and bossy in the nicest way. She loved music and was a fine pianist. After she retired from the NHS she continued to be invited to speak to medical societies. She was taken up by the media over the issue of pollution reducing male fertility. She did medico-legal work, including medical negligence, pursuing justice tempered with mercy: for example helping the acquittal of a drug mule by demonstrating swallowing Bloom's Kosher cocktail sausages (they were the same size as a condomful of cocaine). A foundation has been established in her memory and will fund scholarships in music and medicine.
She is survived by her husband Jack Henry, a retired Reuters editor, two sons and a daughter.
· Jean Ginsburg, endocrinologist, born October 1 1926; died April 8 2004
