Educated at St Bartholomew's Hospital and at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. He practised at Liverpool as Surgeon to the Liverpool Royal Infirmary until his retirement in 1874, when he was appointed Consulting Surgeon. For a time he was Surgeon to the Northern Hospital and Northern Dispensary. In 1844 he joined with James Maurice Banner and William Henry Bainbridge, all three Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons, in a "Reply from the Surgeons of the Liverpool Northern Hospital to a Pamphlet published by J P Halton, one of the Surgeons of the Liverpool Infirmary", revised edition, 1844. Further, in 1876, when it was proposed to placer the election of Medical Officers to the Royal Infirmary wholly under the non-medical committee, he so strenuously resisted the idea that it was abandoned. Stubbs had a most kind-hearted, genial disposition, was full of quaint anecdotes of what he had witnessed in the practice of former years, and he enjoyed a select but lucrative practice. After a time of failing health, he died on July 1st, 1878, at 23 Canning Street, Liverpool, and his funeral was attended by a very large concourse of colleagues and friends. Mrs Stubbs survived him.