Bruce Hunt was born and reared in Melbourne in an atmosphere of traditional scholasticism redolent of ancient Rome and, as martial events would transpire, subliminally of Sparta. He was the son of Atlee Arthur Hunt, CMG, secretary to Sir Edmund Barton, the first prime minister of Australia and subsequently the first head of the Department of External Affairs. The son must have absorbed some of this orderly political ambience for he displayed in his career more than ordinary insight into the complexities of political action and protocol.

Young Hunt attended Melbourne Grammar showing precocious excellence in all areas, but tending initially toward the classics and humanities. However, even before a period of service as a gunner in the First World War he had opted for a medical career. In 1925 he graduated in medicine with honours, and three years later had acquired a Melbourne MD and Membership of the Royal College of Physicians. He worked in Britain and, as was the vogue with the elite of that day, in Vienna where his interests in diabetes and neurology were deepened. It was as a general physician with an interest in these disciplines that he returned to Perth, Western Australia, where he was to practise to the end of his days.

There he forged the basic tenets of consultant medicine in a milieu not yet attuned to that sophistication. He founded the diabetic clinic and maintained it throughout the whole of his career, and entered with boundless energy and effectiveness into the whole panoply of medical politics, education and College affairs. The foundation of the medical school in Western Australia, the development of the Australian Postgraduate Medical Foundation and the course of The Royal Australasian College of Physicians during the tenure of his involvement on Council over a period of sixteen years all felt the force of his persuasive, fervent, logical and committed comment.

Towards his patients he maintained an attitude of ebullient paternalism. Culturally averse to dieting, he permitted his diabetics to range widely over the culinary fields, but this liberal franchise was abruptly terminated should they show signs of gaining weight or lapse of control. To see and hear the massively corpulent Hunt berating some benighted diabetic for weight gain was to be privy to a most awesome tableau credible only to its participants. Yet his diabetics did well. They were effectively educated, meticulously marshalled and regularly reviewed, so that twenty, thirty and forty years after their diagnosis, in the best Joslin traditions, many of them are self-rigorously controlled and free from complications.

His teaching was not memorable. He was of the ex cathedra school - intensely practical, utilitarian and egocentric. Procedures were his forte and he related much better in practice to his surgical colleagues than to his medical brethren with many of whom he sharply conflicted. As a physician at the Royal Perth Hospital he was politically attuned and powerfully ubiquitous.

Fate had other instrumental use for him. As Major Bruce Hunt, a prisoner of the Japanese, he came up through the jungles of Thailand on the infamous Burma Railway in 1943. Tales of his single-minded, bravely obdurate solicitude are legion and legendary. He bestrode that narrow world like a colossus saving many men from lonely even if honourable graves.

Such evocation of Caesar is not coincidental. He was a massive man, portly as he aged but always tall and erect, except in walking when he would progress in a curious short-stepped impatient shamble. The head was noble, bald and closely shorn. The lower lip was unequally prominent and his speech was gracious and felicitous with a certain lalling foppishness of the consonants much as one could imagine might have come from Oscar Wilde. Yet Rabelaisian expletives were not unusual, especially when his standards had not been upheld, when the health of his patients had been foolishly jeopardised or when one of his many causes célèbres was in hazard.

Hypertensive stroke deprived him of his mobility but not his speech or dignity. He loved men, women, horses, music, good food and causes, and did so until the very end. Those who remember him do so in many roles and moods - the patrician mien, the gentle turn of phrase, the great spirit and the sense of channelled power. One turns naturally to that saying which he was pleased to use of those whose ideals and actions lay close to his own: Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit- He touched nothing which he did not adorn’.