--- title: "Kenneth Stuart (1920–2017)" date: "2026-10-29T12:55:15+00:00" modified: "2026-10-29T12:55:16+00:00" url: "https://heritage.humanists.uk/kenneth-stuart/" post_id: 14755 categories: ["Education", "Healthcare", "Science", "Social Reform"] tags: ["Humanism", "Philosophy", "Science", "Social welfare"] --- # Kenneth Stuart (1920–2017) > There is clearly a need for some form of National Ethical Council with a wide-ranging membership, whose role would not only be to review the issues that stemmed or seemed likely to stem from medical scientific advance but also to promote community understanding and discussion of them. > > Sir Kenneth Stuart, letter to *The Independent*, 1996 Sir Kenneth Stuart was a physician and medical scientist who helped to build modern medicine in the Caribbean and then across the Commonwealth. The first West Indian to become Professor of Medicine at the University of the West Indies, he made important discoveries about diseases of the region before spending a decade as the Commonwealth’s chief adviser on health. A patron of Humanists UK for many years, he believed that the moral questions raised by medical science should be settled by reason, compassion and open public debate, not left to doctors, scientists and lawyers alone. ### Life Kenneth Lamont Stuart was born on 16 June 1920 at Bank Hall, Barbados, into a deeply religious home. He went to Wesley Hall Boys’ School and then Harrison College, where his sixth-form classmates included Errol Barrow, later Barbados’ first Prime Minister. In 1940 he won the Barbados Scholarship in classics and went to McGill University in Montreal, where he took a degree in classics and philosophy. Teaching classics was the only career that seemed open to him at home, so he turned to medicine, which, he later said, offered ‘a wider remit for my interests’. In 1943 he crossed the Atlantic in a wartime convoy to study medicine at Queen’s University Belfast. He qualified in 1948 with the Coulter Scholarship in clinical medicine and surgery, took a diploma in tropical medicine at Liverpool, and worked at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London before earning his MD. In 1952 he joined the new University College Hospital of the West Indies in Jamaica as one of its first senior registrars. There, with Gerrit Bras and Derrick Jelliffe, he described veno-occlusive disease of the liver, a disease of children that he traced to bush teas brewed from local plants, and he helped to link the deadly ‘vomiting sickness’ to unripe ackee fruit. Public health campaigns followed, and cases fell sharply. He went on to publish widely on malnutrition, rheumatic fever, heart disease and high blood pressure, setting up a hypertension clinic at the hospital and working in Boston with the cardiologist Paul Dudley White. In 1966 he became the first West Indian Professor of Medicine at the University of the West Indies. He served as Dean of the Medical Faculty from 1969 to 1971 and Head of the Department of Medicine from 1972 to 1976, and campaigned for clinical teaching to spread beyond Jamaica to Barbados and Trinidad. In 1958 he married Barbara Ashby; they had three children. In 1976 Stuart moved to London as Medical Adviser to the Commonwealth Secretariat. For the next decade he advised the Secretary-General and health ministers across the Commonwealth, helping to set up regional health organisations in West Africa, East Africa and the Caribbean and arguing that health was ‘a condition for development’. He was knighted in 1977 for services to medicine in the Caribbean and the Commonwealth. He went on to work as a consultant adviser to the Wellcome Trust, developing distance learning for doctors in poorer countries, and chaired the Court of Governors of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Caribbean Health Research Council. As Gresham Professor of Physic from 1988 to 1992 he gave free public lectures in the City of London on subjects such as ‘The Community and Medical Advance’ and ‘The Social Challenge of Medical Advance’. He was also a trustee of London Lighthouse, the centre for people living with HIV and AIDS, and a patron of Doctors for Human Rights. Stuart was a patron of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK) and lent his name to its campaigns. In 1996 he wrote to *The Independent* proposing a National Ethical Council to help the public think through the dilemmas raised by medical advances, arguing that such questions could not be left to professionals alone. In 2003 he joined fellow patrons in calling for [Darwin](https://heritage.humanists.uk/charles-darwin/)’s birthday to be recognised with a national holiday, and in 2009 he was one of 26 leading scientists, including three Nobel laureates, who signed a letter organised by the BHA urging the Government to put evolution into the primary school curriculum in England. He remained active into his nineties, swimming off Brighton beach and playing tennis, and died in London on 11 November 2017, aged 97. ### Influence Stuart’s research saved lives in the Caribbean, his teaching trained a generation of West Indian doctors, and his work for the Commonwealth helped poorer countries build health systems of their own. Underpinning it all was a humanist conviction that ethical and scientific questions are best answered by rational thinking and kindness, and that the public should share in decisions about how medical science is used. As Humanists UK remembered him, his was a life ‘dedicated to making the world a better place’. ### Read more [Humanists UK mourns its patron, Sir Kenneth Stuart](https://humanists.uk/2017/11/24/humanists-uk-mourns-its-patron-sir-kenneth-stuart/), Humanists UK, 24 November 2017 Sir Henry Fraser, ‘Sir Kenneth Stuart’, *West Indian Medical Journal*, 67 (1), 2018, p. 94 [Obituary: Sir Kenneth Lamont Stuart](https://alumni.qub.ac.uk/obituary-sir-kenneth-lamont-stuart), Queen’s University Belfast Sir Kenneth Stuart interviewed by Sir Gordon Wolstenholme, 1 February 1990, Medical Sciences Video Archive (Royal College of Physicians and Oxford Brookes University) [Lectures by Sir Kenneth Stuart](https://gresham.ac.uk/node/9908), Gresham College See also ---------- - [ Darwin Day: a celebration of science and humanity ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/article/darwin-day-a-celebration-of-science-and-humanity/) - [ Alice Vickery ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/alice-vickery/) - [ Darcus Howe ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/darcus-howe/) - [ Alex Comfort ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/alex-comfort/)