He was to achieve a high reputation in his field of medicine, endocrinology (a study of the functions of the body’s glands and their hormones), and in academic life – serving as president of the Royal College of Physicians from 1983 to 1989, and of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1985 to 1993.
From exceptionally brilliant schooldays in Port Elizabeth, 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 in 1948.
After internship at Groote Schuur and a junior lectureship at UCT’s 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 married Margaret Rosenberg in 1949.
Hoffenberg’s political loyalty lay always with Alan Paton’s Liberal Party. He was also particularly close to the chairman, Peter Brown.
His greatest influence was probably with the 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 banned him in July 1967 from all political and social activity, permitting him to continue his work only until the end of 1967.
After a national outcry, the Hoffenbergs left South Africa on a one-way "exit permit" in 1968. In exile, Hoffenberg continued his work against apartheid, speaking, writing and giving his name for the cause.
In 1972 he was offered the William Withering chair of medicine at Birmingham University, serving there until 1985.
He became president of the International Society for Endocrinology and chairman of the British Heart Foundation and of the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear War.
In the 1990s and the current decade he visited South Africa many times, reporting on the country’s medical schools to the ANC government at their request, and in England he cared for ANC president Oliver Tambo, his patient for many years in exile.
He made a final visit to South Africa last month.