We study the Brown measure of certain non-hermitian operators arising from Voiculescu's free probability theory. Usually those operators appear as the limit in *-moments of certain ensembles of non-hermitian random matrices, and the Brown measure gives then a canonical candidate for the limit eigenvalue distribution of the random matrices. A prominent class for our operators is given by polynomials in *-free variables. Other explicit examples include R-diagonal elements and elliptic elements, for which the Brown measure was already known, and a new class of triangular-elliptic elements. Our method for the calculation of the Brown measure is based on a rigorous mathematical treatment of the hermitian reduction method, as considered in the physical literature, combined with subordination ideas and the linearization trick.