Richard Lamerton was such a reluctant medical student that he was planning to become a bookbinder when he heard a lecture given by Dame Cicely Saunders about hospice care.

He was so inspired that he became one of the first medical students to focus on hospice care right from the beginning of his studies. He became an apprentice of Dame Saunders and later went on to found hospices all over England and the world, and is especially well known for his holistic approach to the care of the terminally ill. He recently retired from his position as medical director of Hospice of the Valleys in south Wales.

He was in Bermuda this week to give a lecture on hospice care for PALS as part of their 25th anniversary celebration. "I was horrified by medicine in medical school," said Dr. Lamerton in an interview with The Royal Gazette. "I really felt I was in the wrong place."

His parents forced him to go to medical school even though he wanted to be a classical ballet dancer.

"Dame Saunders is very well known in Britain," Dr. Lamerton said. "She qualified first as a nurse, then as a social worker, then as a doctor. She is an extraordinary lady. She is in her late eighties now and still powerful."

During a lecture entitled 'A Vision for Total Cancer Care' held at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI) last week, Dr. Lamerton said hospice care organisations like PALS allow two thirds of terminally ill patients to remain at home where they want to be.

"Hospice of the Valleys is similar to the work done here in Bermuda," he said. "It has the same size population as Bermuda. The difference in the Welsh valleys is the human mono culture. It is mostly all Welsh and white. The multiracial aspect isn't one that I can say much about."

He said services for patients have to be designed with the needs of the patient in mind, not the convenience of the medical staff.

"Patients and their families need to feel safe and that the medical professionals care about them," he said. "There has to be staff devotion. That means you don't just walk off at the end of your shift if there is more to be done."

Dr. Lamerton's main message was that a patient has to be healed emotionally and spiritually as well as physically.

Hospice of the Valleys offers its patients a number of different options while they are undergoing treatment including reflexology, art therapy, yoga and the service of spiritual healers.

Dr. Lamerton himself is now a spiritual healer at Hospice of the Valleys.

"I used to be embarrassed about being a healer," he said. "I am aggressive about it now. I had been working since 1984 with healers in the hospice. Every clinic included healers. Having started by patronising them like a typical doctor, 'it doesn't harm the patients, they like it, it's all right'; I went on to respect the healers and went on to be taught by them.

"While you need to be healed to be cured, you don't necessarily need to be cured to be healed. There is all kinds of healing at different levels within people."

He said he decided to retire from mainstream medicine because he was getting older.

"I am approaching old age, perhaps a little sooner than some people do," he said. "I found I was getting very tired. My memory was going and you need a good memory to be a good doctor. You have to remember the names of the drugs and details about patients. I wasn't remembering it anymore.

"The function of old age isn't just the running down of everything and the prelude to death. Old age is there for spiritual development. You don't need to think of new things. You are there to grow in spiritual wisdom. So it seemed time to retire."

Dr. Lamerton said he didn't feel bad about his retirement knowing that he had trained hundreds of people in hospice care.

"Dame Saunders message is reaching all the corners of the earth and I have helped with that," he said. "Her message was good hospice care, and that people should be looked after physically, emotionally, socially and spiritually to enable them to live well until they die and the family to go on living afterward. She taught how to do it, as well. It was by a quality of profound attention, a depth of listening."

The realisation that he could be a spiritual healer as well as a doctor happened by accident. He was in a meeting with several other people when a colleague began to cough and sneeze. Without thought he stood up, put his hands on her throat and her sniffles disappeared.

He was surprised, but didn't think about healing again until the early 1980s when he met a healer from Gokwe, Zimbabwe called Lazarus Muyambi.

"We became instant friends and we still are," said Dr. Lamerton.

Dr. Muyambi formed a group called the Community of the Holy Fire.

"The purpose of the community is to encourage the rediscovery of the healing ministry in the churches," said Dr. Lamerton, who belongs to an order of the community called The Loving Caring Members (LCMs).

"Almost everybody can write, but not everyone can write poetry," Dr. Lamerton said. "I expect most people can heal, but some people are clearly gifted healers. Lazarus is stunning."

Dr. Lamerton started visiting Dr. Muyambi in Zimbabwe on an annual basis.

He said: "I mainly used to go at Easter to help them get the harvest in. All the Easter celebrations are so wonderful, such enormous fun, and so moving. The Passion play out in the bush is so gripping. Africans don't go at things in half measures. The crucifixion is alarmingly realistic and the flogging of Christ was frighteningly realistic. I got gradually drawn into the healing."

Dr. Lamerton and his wife Patricia became very involved in the mission's orphanage which houses 65 children.

"I got to know lots of the kids," he said. "I am now the secretary of the LCMs in Britain. There are a half million Zimbabweans in Britain now, large numbers of them are LCMs. So we now have an annual conference and a big Pentecostal meeting. I am the co-ordinator of that. I have taken on the orphanage which is in dire difficulty in Zimbabwe at the moment. In fact, there are days when they have run out of food."

Dr. Lamerton and his wife, who already had two grown daughters, Jessica and Rachael, adopted three children from the orphanage, Bernadet, Willie and Robert.

"They are now 19, 20 and 21 years old," he said. "They were all in Zimbabwe. We went to see them every year at Easter and they came to see us. They went to boarding school in Zimbabwe because we thought it was best for them to remain within their own culture. For the long holiday they would go to the mission and help work on the farm. That is how we were doing it."

Changes in the political climate made this arrangement difficult to maintain.

"Then it started to get nasty over there," he said. "The food is running out. When they reached their teenage years they were in grave danger of being snatched into Mugabe's training camps. That means the girls are raped and the boys are beaten and humiliated to the point where they are angry, bewildered and confused and then they are given political prisoners to kill."

He likened it to the Hitler youth movement of the 1930s in Germany.

"My son Willie called me up and said 'Dad, they've forced me to join ZANU."

ZANU or Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front is Robert Mugabe's political party.

Dr. Lamerton, safe in Wales, did not understand the severity of the situation.

"I said 'don't worry just agree with them whatever they say. You know what you believe, and when it comes down to vote, vote against them'. He said, 'you don't understand' and he was right."

Two weeks later, the lorries arrived for Willie.

"All he did was go to a school," said Dr. Lamerton. "It was the only school we could find that was teaching sciences and had fully equipped laboratories. Other schools were giving up on sciences because they couldn't afford the things they needed for the laboratories.

"I was very surprised when Willie found a school where they were teaching science. It was so well equipped. I was delighted when he'd found it."

Not long after Willie started attending classes an electric fence was erected around the school with razor wire across the top. School officials said it was to keep out thieves.

Dr. Lamerton received more worried calls from Willie about his headmaster's bizarre methods of punishment.

"Then Willie tells me the headmaster has murdered someone," Dr. Lamerton said. "The police came to arrest him and the headmaster shot them dead. The police didn't come again."

One night lorries came to take the students into a nearby town to beat people up, and burn down houses.

"At that point Willie took matters into his own hands," said Dr. Lamerton. "One boy said 'I know how to turn off the electric fence'. They all went to their dormitories and put on two pairs of jeans to get over the razor wire. He switched the fence off, and they climbed over and about 200 of them did a dash into the bush. Willie had the good sense to double back into town and empty his bank account first."

When Willie telephoned to tell him the news it finally dawned on Dr. Lamerton that something really bad was going on. Then he saw television programmes about it on the BBC.

Willie disappeared for a few days, but when he turned up again, was put on a plane to England.

"The British authorities immediately announced that they were going to deport him," said Dr. Lamerton. "I fought like crazy and our MP struck down the deportation and he came to live with us. We got him into a school, and then the British authorities discovered that he was going to a state school, which isn't allowed for immigrants.

Willie was sent to a private school where he is currently doing his O levels.

"I just spoke to his tutor and she said he is a model student," said Dr. Lamerton. "He has the highest marks of all the students in the year. He actually got a distinction on everyone of his assignments but one. He will be a walkover for university. He has been living with us for three years now."

Dr. Lamerton's other two adopted children Robert and Bernadet are currently attending the University of Glamorgan in Wales and are also doing well.

"I am looking for sponsors for the orphans in Zimbabwe," said Dr. Lamerton. "I need $1,400 a year to educate a child. Then I am also doing active fund raising with trusts to get money for their university education in Britain later. Originally, Mugabe's camp was for the street kids, which numbered about 50,000. Now he has turned his attention to orphans."

To make a donation write to: Community of the Holy Fire, Secretary, Brookfield, Tarrington, Hereford, UK HR1 4HZ