An emaciated homeless man’s life was saved after a passer-by came to his aid — but for humanitarian Jonathan Guishard, the gesture merely underscored an old message.

Initially reluctant to speak to The Royal Gazette, Mr Guishard acknowledged that he’d noticed the man’s plight, then rushed him to the hospital for treatment out of a deep sense of common humanity.

“He was on his last legs,” Mr Guishard said of the man, who asked not to be named in this story to protect his privacy.

“No matter somebody’s politics, race, lifestyle, age or financial ability, human beings need to take care of each other.”

The elderly man, often seen in the Bailey’s Bay area, was plainly malnourished and disorientated when Mr Guishard spotted him slumped on a dockside wall last Thursday.

A part-time caregiver for the Elder Home Care nursing facility, Mr Guishard checked the man’s heart rate after asking him to sit in his car.

“He didn’t look like his usual self. I asked when he’d last eaten and he didn’t remember. I’m certified in CPR — his pulse was barely there at all. He told me he was going to sleep there on the dock.

“He’s not an alcoholic, just an old man who doesn’t have any family. He’s had a tough life. I told him I couldn’t allow him to stay there like that.

“I told him I could barely feel his pulse and he said ‘I feel like I’m going to die’.”

At about 10pm, the two arrived at the Emergency Room in King Edward VII Memorial Hospital (KEMH). Doctors stabilised the man and were eventually able to feed him.

Mr Guishard left at 2.30am, and got the requested update call at around 4am.

“They said he was doing better, but that if he wasn’t in hospital and had slept on the dock, he very probably wouldn’t have made the night.”

Even in hot weather, a severely weakened person left out in the elements can easily succumb to exposure.

KEMH staff referred the man to a general practitioner, and Mr Guishard said he’s kept careful tabs on the man’s progress.

“He told me ‘You really did save me’,” Mr Guishard recalled.

Taking care of others runs in the family: Mr Guishard’s mother, Juanita Guishard-Packwood, received the Queen’s Certificate and Badge of Honour in 2010 for her decades of service in mental healthcare.

A long-standing marketer for Bermuda Tourism all over the US East Coast, Mr Guishard said he’d since retired but still took deep inspiration as well from “old school” Bermuda values of hospitality.

He spent 12 years representing the Island’s once-booming tourist industry in New York and Chicago, but hearkens to a motto from farther back than that.

“When I was around 13, the Government had a tag line to get Bermudians excited about tourism — I remember we got these pins that said ‘Bermuda is you and me’.

“To this day, that’s something that always sticks in my head and that I think about, including at times like that one.”