My father, Sir Kenneth Stuart, who has died aged 97, rose from a modest background to become medical director of the Commonwealth. He helped establish the University of the West Indies, in Jamaica, and worked against racism and health inequalities.

He was born into a respectable but humble family in Barbados, then a British colony. His father, Egbert, was a steward at the exclusive Bridgetown Club, while his mother, Louise (nee Rock), owned the Blue Caribbean hotel.

He attended Harrison college on the island. In those days there was one scholarship a year to attend university from Barbados and Kenneth won it, first studying classics at McGill University, Montreal, then moving to London to study medicine. He was evacuated to Belfast, where he obtained his MD at Queen’s University.

In 1952 Kenneth became one of the band of idealistic academics building up the newly established University of the West Indies in Kingston, where he worked in both clinical and academic posts. He described a previously unknown medical disorder, acute toxic hypoglycaemia, caused by eating the unripe ackee fruit, as well as veno-occlusive disease of the liver, which was killing Jamaican children who were drinking a bush tea. Both of these conditions were all but eliminated over the next two decades. In 1966 he became UWI’s first West Indian professor, and subsequently dean of the faculty of medicine.

In 1958 Kenneth had married Barbara (nee Ashby). They had three children, and we enjoyed an idyllic childhood on campus as our parents set about building a new Caribbean. Many of the children from that campus are still firm friends today. However, the political and social situation on the island was getting threatening, and in 1976 the family moved to London, where my father served as medical adviser to the Commonwealth Secretariat. He was knighted in 1977.

He served on boards for the Wellcome Trust, the World Health Organisation and he was a Freeman of the City of London. He was a founder trustee and patron of the charity Students Partnership Worldwide (now known as Restless Development), and a member of the academic board of St George’s University, Grenada, for more than 25 years. Ken continued to be intellectually and physically active into his 90s, playing tennis every day, and publishing his last paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2011 on reducing global health inequalities.

Ken was passionate about human rights and health inequalities, and open-minded and liberal in his dealings with others. He held traditional values of hard work and service to others, combined with contemporary social values and personal courtesy and charm.

He is survived by Barbara, his children and four granddaughters.