.

ECLARE the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future. Practise these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two things ? to help, or at least to do no harm.

Hippocrates, secular patron saint of doctors, laid down these straightforward but compelling guidelines almost 2,000 years ago. Like most such conventions, they tend to be honoured more in the breach than in the observance by members of the medical profession.

But to John Stubbs these words represented more than just an ancient code of conduct. They provided the guiding principles he lived by both as a physician and a politician.

John Stubbs had an almost preternatural ability to analyse what had gone before, apply its impact to current circumstances and anticipate the consequences. And in both medicine and the public arena he inevitably helped to check the diseases his forensic skills identified. To simply stand by and do no harm was never an acceptable option.

There's a story told about a young John Stubbs that foreshadows the course of his life and dual careers.

In 1959, as a recently qualified doctor, Stubbs returned to Bermuda for a brief holiday from his ongoing studies abroad.

Serving as a locum at a Pitts Bay Road doctors' surgery, he had an office visit from one of Bermuda's leading political and business figures.

The elderly gentleman was ailing. Nothing serious, he reassured Stubbs. Flu-like symptoms. Dizziness. Occasional shortness of breath.

He would have been content if Stubbs had scribbled out a prescription for an antibiotic and sent him on his way. Most doctors would have done just that.

Stubbs told the man's son, who had accompanied him, that he wanted to give his father a thorough examination. The son protested, saying there was nothing wrong with the old boy that a couple of aspirins wouldn't fix. Stubbs insisted.

hours later the father and son left Stubbs' surgery. Stubbs had made a preliminary diagnosis of a rare form of cancer hidden deep within the brain. He strongly recommended his patient leave the island immediately to get a second opinion at one of the leading New York teaching hospitals.

Stubbs set the trip in motion, arranged appointments in New York. It seemed next to impossible that Stubbs would have been able to diagnose such an obscure but virulent disease in a rudimentary surgery, using just his fingers, eyes and instincts. But the man's family had been impressed by both Stubbs' thoroughness and encyclopaedic medical knowledge. They flew to New York.

Two weeks later, after undergoing a battery of sophisticated tests, the doctors in New York confirmed the initial diagnosis. The patient began treatment immediately.

"I don't know who the hell this guy Stubbs is," the disbelieving chief of the oncology department told the elderly man's son, "but Bermuda had better hang on to him. You won't come across another man like him in this lifetime."

The New York specialist's words proved to be prophetic on both counts. Bermuda did indeed embrace John Stubbs until the end of his sadly abbreviated life in 1994. And the island has not seen his like since.

From the time he returned to Bermuda on a permanent basis in 1965 until his death, John Stubbs not only provided the community with the benefits of his medical prowess but also applied his diagnostic skills to the Bermudian body politic ? pinpointing malignancies, working to treat and, if possible, cure them.

A professional polymath ? he earned degrees from McGill, Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ? the same instincts that propelled Stubbs into a medical career impelled him towards politics.

Stubbs believed that only progress driven by reason could overturn the prejudices, superstitions and established convictions that threatened to destroy Bermuda in the 1960s. His conviction that reason was a healing power, almost akin to medicine itself, was absolute and it was yoked to a relentless zeal for social and political justice.

By the mid-1960s, social and political justice were long overdue in Bermuda. The island was an increasingly unviable anachronism.

Administered as a large country club rather than a little country by an oligarchy of Bermudian merchants and the foreign overseers of the island's tourism industry, Bermuda's fa?ade of genteel civility was beginning to crack.

The island was in spirit not far removed from the theme parks that proved so popular in later decades ? an artificial and manicured world of colonial buildings and afternoon teas and horse-drawn carriages designed and managed expressly to appeal to visitors.

Bermudians were expected to know their place, to serve on tourists with locked-in-place smiles and no hint of resentment, to have little say in the management of their own affairs.

When the Trade Development Board, precursor to the island's Tourism Ministry, embarked on its ambitious project to turn Bermuda into an upscale resort for the very rich in the 1920s, it re-engineered both Bermuda's physical and social structures.

As Tucker's Town, with its gilded hotels, golf courses and villas emerged from a swampy, mosquito-ridden backwater, the island's segregationist policies became as a sop to the affluent East Coast clientele Bermuda began attracting in earnest.

The colour bar was lowered across Bermudian society. Blacks were not allowed to eat in restaurants where they worked as waiters and chefs or stay in hotels where they manned all positions except those in the executive suite.

Such manifestations of what would later be called petit apartheid were minor next to the crippling obstructions that barred the economic, educational and professional advancement of blacks in the newly affluent Bermuda.

By the 1960s there was internal agitation and external pressure for change in this unnatural Edwardian throwback, one that only grudgingly began to adapt to the requirements of the Atomic Age. The Progressive Group had ended segregation in public places with its cinema boycott. The Committee for Universal Adult Franchise was campaigning for reform of Bermuda's extremely limited franchise (in the 1950s Dr. E.F. Gordon was fond of pointing out that only seven per cent of Bermudians were eligible to vote in the island's elections).

Sir Julian Gascoigne was dispatched here with a mandate to act as a catalyst for change. His well-known preference for socialising at the Blue Waters Anglers Club rather than the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club may have been a symbolic gesture. But it was the kind of symbolism Bermuda's establishment had never encountered before. A clear and unmistakable message was being telegraphed by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

Two political parties emerged in this unsettled period, each advocating very different avenues to the future.

The United Bermuda Party adopted a conciliatory approach to race relations and an evolutionary approach to change. Its overriding strategic objective ? which its founding fathers recognised may in fact have come too late ? was to bridge the cultural divide between Bermuda's racial communities for the common good.

The Progressive Labour Party had a more revolutionary agenda. It espoused what at the time was known as Third World Socialism, a nationalist variation on Marxism in which an oppressed native people stood in for an oppressed working class.

It was on to this increasingly tense stage that John Stubbs strode. Of humble origins, he felt no allegiance to or kinship with Bermuda's old aristocracy. And he felt only revulsion for the radicalised elements preaching revolution.

Stubbs recognised that the UBP's initial, tepid plan to create what amounted to a half-way house between segregation and full democracy and integration would amount to an exercise in futility. Similarly, he believed the PLP's desire to replace white exclusivity with black separatism would doom the island to an unending cycle of sectarianism.

If each racial community believed it could only thrive by dominating the other, Stubbs predicted a future of conflict, a never-ending cycle of mutual distrust and recriminations. He could anticipate blood feuds and vendettas multiplying like so many cancer cells. He could foresee the seeds of new strife being sown as a result of whatever terms the victorious racial grouping attempted to impose on the subjugated one.

Dragooned into the nascent UBP by Sir Henry (Jack) Tucker and Sir Edward Richards, the twin architects of what inevitably became known as "The House That Jack Built", John Stubbs was in many respects the party's chief engineer.

As the party chairman, he began recruiting young Bermudians ? both black and white ? to serve in the front ranks of the UBP. Drawing on his extensive network of contacts in both communities, Stubbs entreated, cajoled and sometimes bullied Bermudians into serving. When confronted with his own robust example, recognising the enormous amounts of time energy he was expending on this political experiment in social evolution, few refused his appeals.

As Harry Viera, one of his closest political allies and personal friends, said: "The UBP was in its infancy. Sir Henry and Sir Edward had organised the Parliamentary group. But there was no structure to support it. No central office, no parochial organisations, no committees. Everything had to be built from scratch. We were building a ship and sailing it at the same time. Under John Stubbs' indefatigable chairmanship, things started to happen with astonishing speed."

Stubbs detected an infirmity of purpose in the early UBP, found a party still straight-jacketed by many of the old conventions.

A vigorous champion of change, he set to work challenging all of the institutions and orthodoxies of the old Bermuda.

He fought with both a scalpel-keen rapier and, when a necessary, a bludgeon to forge a party that could advance the political, social and economic status of the great majority of Bermudians. He shrank from no foe in this effort. The oligarchs with their vested interests. Those who wanted to perpetuate the limited franchise. Particularly those who invoked pseudo-scientific or quasi-anthropological arguments to justify their intractable racism.

Stubbs fought ? and bested ? all these forces of reaction long before he confronted the radical demagoguery of the PLP on the campaign trail.

at the 1968 General Election, the first held under both the Universal Franchise and the two-party political system, Stubbs proved himself as adept a campaigner as he was a behind-the-scenes organiser and wire-puller.

He and running-mate Gloria McPhee defeated then PLP Leader Walter Robinson and Gospel Simmons in Hamilton West, a constituency more than three-quarters black.

To Stubbs this victory was a ringing validation of his theory that the races could indeed work together in Bermuda for the common good. Stubbs remained a fixture in Bermuda's Parliament for the rest of his life. Whether serving in Cabinet or on the backbenches, in the Lower or Upper House, he brought an invigorating style, finish and energy to politics.

Animated by a sense of the possible ? an incurable optimism ? John Stubbs viewed public service as an almost chivalric adventure. He cheerfully conceded to labouring under a Galahad Complex, a swashbuckling sense of duty to his community. In an age when Bermudians increasingly view politics as a vehicle for personal gain and self-advancement rather than public service, Stubbs' commitment seems quaint indeed.

But his passion was shared by others. Stubbs and his two closest confreres, Viera and Dr. Stanley Ratteray, were routinely referred to as "The Three Musketeers" of Bermudian politics ? young, vigorous men never happier than when they were putting cant, hypocrisy and obstructionism to the sword.

This dashing soubriquet, at once heroic and romantic, appealed to the idealist in Stubbs. Sadly, the Athos, Porthos and Aramis of political derring-do never conscripted any young D'Artagnans to their ranks ? D'Artagnans who are sorely needed in the present time.

Years before Robert F. Kennedy co-opted it as the motto of his ultimately tragic quest for the White House, John Stubbs had all but appropriated George Bernard Shaw's famous aphorism as his own: "Some men see things as they are and ask 'Why'? I dream things that never were, and ask 'Why not'?"

Among the things Stubbs dreamed of was a Bermuda where reason was the keystone in the arch of political discourse. He was to be sorely disappointed. Fiscally conservative but socially an energetic and unapologetic liberal, Stubbs was throughout his career in the vanguard of sometimes unpopular change.

From integration to abortion, from his efforts to break up the banking duopoly that existed in the early 1970s to his final crusade to decriminalise homosexuality in the 1990s, Stubbs frequently found himself in a minority of one.

He was aware his often forward-looking ideas would require time, sometimes very considerable amounts of time, to germinate and flourish in Bermuda's barren political soil. But he was never afraid to pursue them.

He was cowed neither by the oligarchs nor the mob, the great business concerns or the churches. The dishonest saying "Vox populi, vox dei" ("The voice of the people is the voice of God") has often been exploited in Bermuda to cement alliances of convenience between self-serving vested interests and the credulous mob. This was certainly true as far as abortion and homosexuality were concerned.

Stubbs, of course, it helped that this supreme rationalist believed that in challenging the sometimes stridently vocal populi on such issues, the dei part was nonsense as well. Stubbs never publicly chastised the churches that twice incited reactionary backlashes among their congregations to his initiatives. But he privately cited a Biblical injunction to describe both their intransigence and dependence on mob tactics: "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil."

In theory he was a supporter of another unpopular cause, Independence, even while recognising that in practice this issue was likely forever doomed to being hijacked by desperate or demagogic politicians.

His vision for an Independent Bermuda took in the whole scene. It was a bird's-eye view of the island unhindered by ground-level party divisions and racial and social schisms.

"In the future 'We' must mean 'We Bermudians' and not 'We black Bermudians' or 'We white Bermudians'," he told an audience in 1976.

"Bermuda is capable of being an example to the world. Its leaders would beat a path to Bermuda's door to see how it is done. It will help all of us, black and white, to see that we need each other, that we must work as a united community to shape our common interests and forge our common identity.

"I am confident that Independence will have the psychological impact of banging our black and white heads together.

"It will make us realise that black pride, black separatism and white elitism, white traditionalism are the seeds of our collective destruction.

"Unchecked and working against one another, these forces will drive away our tourists and dry up the well of international business.

"When all the dust has settled from such sectarian inter-racial strife, we will, those who survive, enjoy only the Spartan pleasures of fishing and farming. And we are so tiny and insignificant in the vastness of the world stage, no one would mourn our failure.

"If, collectively, we are so stupid as to allow ourselves to suffer this fate, we will have failed more than ourselves. We will have failed humanity.

"Nowhere on God's earth do people of two races have such an opportunity as ours.

"If we succeed, we will enjoy far more than the delights and success of our own triumph. We will have set an example to the world. We must do it. We must achieve something that has never been done before."

Stubbs' soul had possession of one of those rare treasure maps that led him to all manner of magnificent prizes. A savant and a sportsman; a politician of local and international repute (he served on Senator Edward Kennedy's Senate Sub-Committee on health reform in the 1970s); a man of science and a man of action (at great personal risk during the 1980s he repeatedly travelled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier to treat refugees from the Soviet invasion); an altogether transcendent public figure who valued his private time as a husband and father.

More than a decade after his death, those who knew and loved John Stubbs best miss him most. But Bermuda misses him most of all.

There are few in public life today capable of declaring the past, diagnosing the present and foretelling the future with the inherent skill of John Stubbs. And there is no one at all who has made a habit of helping their community with the same energy, determination or unwavering sense purpose.