Halliday Sutherland

Early life

Halliday Sutherland was born in Glasgow, Scotland on 24 June 1882. He was educated at High School of Glasgow and Merchiston Castle School. Shortly after the First World War he became a Roman Catholic. In 1920 he married Muriel Fitzpatrick. They lived at 5 Stafford Terrace Kensington in London and had six children. He died aged 77 in the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, St Marylebone, London on 19 April 1960.

Career

Sutherland graduated from Edinburgh University with a MB, Ch B in 1906 and MD with honours in 1908. Following graduation he worked closely with Robert William Philip (later "Sir"), described as a "pioneer of modern anti-tuberculosis schemes". In 1911, Sutherland founded a tuberculosis clinic and an open-air school in the bandstand of Regent's Park in London and produced "The Story of John M'Neil", thought to be Britain's first cinema film on health education. During the First World War, Sutherland served in the Royal Navy (including service on RMS Empress of Britain) and in the Royal Air Force.

After the War he held the following posts:

Sutherland was President of the Tuberculosis Society of Great Britain and an honorary physician to, and council member of, the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium Fund.

In 1954 he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of Isabel the Catholic and awarded the Pope John XXI Medal in 1955.

Books

Sutherland was a writer of books and articles. His major works were:

The Arches of the Years was Sutherland's most successful book. It was a best-seller for 1933, ran to 35 editions in English, and was translated into eight languages. G.K. Chesterton described Sutherland's writing as follows: "Dr. Halliday Sutherland is a born writer, especially a born story-teller. Dr. Sutherland, who is distinguished in medicine, is an amateur in the sense that he only writes when he has nothing better to do. But when he does, it could hardly be done better."

Irish Journey includes an account of Dr Sutherland's visit to the Magdalene Laundry in Galway in April 1955. To visit this institution, Sutherland needed the permission of Michael Browne, the Bishop of Galway. Permission was granted, on condition that Sutherland allowed his account to be censored by the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Mercy, who ran the institution. Accordingly, the account of his visit to the Laundry in "Irish Journey" was censored. In 2013, the publishers draft of "Irish Journey" was discovered in a cellar and the uncensored version was published in "The Suitcase in the Cellar" on hallidaysutherland.com

Public opposition of eugenics, Malthusianism and disputes with Marie Stopes

Sutherland publicly opposed the doctrines of eugenics and Malthusianism, which were then more fashionable than they are today. This brought him into a bitter and public dispute with Dr Marie Stopes.

Eugenics

In the main, eugenists agreed with the sentiments of Dr John Haycraft who, in an 1894 speech on "Darwinism and Race Progress" at the Royal College of Physicians, had said the "preventative medicine is trying a unique experiment, and the effect is already discernible – race decay". The argument was that providing medical attention to those who would have perished in previous eras ran in the face of "the survival of the fittest". Race decay would surely result as the unfit, given succour, would live long enough to propagate their genes.

The first evidence of Sutherland opposing eugenists was in his article: "The Seed or the Soil in Tuberculosis". The article as written in response to a lecture "Tuberculosis, Heredity and Environment" given by Karl Pearson on March 12, 1912 at the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics.

At the beginning of his lecture, Pearson said that the stated that the “importance of the discovery of Koch [of the tubercle bacillus] cannot be overrated,” but he went on to say that this had led to a focus on infection as the cause of tuberculosis. His view was that there should have been a proper scientific inquiry as to the relative importance of the hereditary and environmental factors and of the liability to infection in the cause of the disease. Pearson had previously asserted that "the influence of environment is not one-fifth of heredity, and quite possibly not one-tenth of it," so he felt that by focussing on infection, the most significant cause was being ignored. Pearson provided statistics to back up his assertions. Towards the end of his lecture, Pearson moved away from science to the political action that should be taken as a result of his findings:

In "The Seed or the Soil in Tuberculosis," Sutherland rebutted Pearson's assertions and provided statistics to support his assertions. At this stage, In the British Medical Journal, disagreement was on the grounds of statistics and science. By 1917, Sutherland opposed eugenics was on ethical grounds as well.

On Tuesday, 4 September 1917 Sutherland addressed the National Council of the Y.M.C.A. on "Consumption: Its Cause and Cure". He said that while “modern medicine [has]…found the cause, sources and cure of this disease", he identified that the barriers to its prevention were man-made. The obstacles were apathy, arrogance, ignorance, indifference, and eugenics.

Stopes had met Sir Francis Galton when a child and had been interested in eugenics at least since 1912 when she joined the Eugenics Education Society (she became a life fellow in 1921). In 1921, she founded the "Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress", in part because she was "annoyed that the (Eugenics Education) Society refused to place birth control prominently on its platform". The aim of the society was to "promote eugenic birth control". At the time the issues of birth control and eugenics were closely related: one historian has written: "in the interwar years birth control and eugenics were so intertwined as to be synonymous". Stopes stated the eugenic purpose of her clinic on the second day of the Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial in 1923. Under oath, she explained the purpose of the society that had been set up to run the clinic:

Stopes outlined her eugenic vision in the final chapter of Radiant Motherhood: A Book for those Who Are Creating the Future, published in 1920. She outlined her "ardent dream" of "human stock represented only by well-formed, desired and well-endowed beautiful men and women". An obstacle to its accomplishment was "inborn incapacity" which lay "in the vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded, and unbalanced who are now in our midst", a class of people who were "appallingly prolific". The solution was "a few very simple Acts of Parliament" for the compulsory sterilisation of "the miserable, the degenerate [and] the utterly wretched in mind and body". In March 1921, Stopes opened her birth control clinic in the east-end of London.

Malthusianism

In 1922 Sutherland wrote Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo Malthusians in which he attacked “the essential fallacies of Malthusian teaching”. He said there was "no evidence whatever to prove that the population is pressing on the soil. On the contrary, we find ample physical resources sufficient to support the entire population, and we also find evidence of human injustice, incapacity, and corruption sufficient to account for the poverty and misery that exist in these countries". Sutherland argued that "organised poverty" arose when in the sixteenth century "the greater part of the land, including common land belonging to the poor, had been seized by the rich" and the Parliamentary Acts for the enclosure of common land between 1714 and 1820.

Disputes with Marie Stopes

Birth Control is remembered today as the work that contained the passages that Stopes asserted were defamatory, which led to the Stopes v. Sutherland case. The book referred to Stopes twice.

In the first instance, Sutherland reproduced a letter Stopes had written (as President of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress) to the Sussex Daily News and which had appeared in the paper on 17 November. Stopes had written:

Sutherland wrote that this was a "malignant attack" on the medical profession. In the second instance, under the headings "Specially Hurtful to the Poor" and "Exposing the Poor to Experiment", Sutherland wrote:

The paragraph echoes one in Chapter XX of "Radiant Motherhood" in which Stopes criticised the ability of doctors and social reforms to improve the health of the population:

Charles Bradlaugh (and Annie Besant) had been tried in 1877 for publishing 'obscene literature'. They had published an American Malthusian tract in Britain. The original document was The Fruits of Philosophy which "advocated and gave explicit information about contraceptive methods". For the British version, Bradlaugh and Besant had added a subtitle: An Essay on the Population Question and a preface "we believe, with the Rev. Mr. Malthus, that population has a tendency to increase faster than the means of existence, and that some checks must therefore exercise control over population".

Stopes sued Sutherland for libel and the case commenced in the High Court on 21 February 1923. The defendants (Sutherland and his publisher) won. Stopes appealed, won, and was awarded damages of one hundred pounds. Sutherland appealed to the House of Lords and the case was heard for the third time on 21 November 1924. Sutherland won. Stopes was ordered to repay the one hundred pounds arising from the previous hearing, and to pay the defendant's costs in relation to the appeals to the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords.

A second case arose when, in January 1929, Stopes publication Birth Control News attacked Sutherland and this time it was he who took legal action against her for libel. He lost in the Court of Appeal.