Sir Robert Hutchison, 1st Baronet

Early life and education

Robert Hutchison was born on 28 October 1871 at Carlowrie Castle east of Kirkliston, and west of Edinburgh in Scotland to Robert Hutchison of Carlowrie FRSE and his wife, Mary Jemima Tait. He was the youngest of seven children. His father was a wine merchant, who, having a good knowledge of forestry, had authored a number of papers, and was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His mother, Mary Jemima, was the daughter of Rev Adam Duncan Tait, minister of Kirkliston.

Hutchison had his school education at the Collegiate School, Edinburgh, and then joined the University of Edinburgh in 1889 for his medical education. He graduated with first class honours and medals in all subjects except physics in 1893, and also gained the Ettles Scholarship. He was then posted as house resident in various departments including the Paediatrics department at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London. He later visited Strasbourg and Paris for his studies, and later was appointed to a junior post in the department of chemical pathology in Edinburgh. He obtained his MD degree and MRCP (Ed) in 1896.

Professional career

Hutchison was then posted as a resident at the Hospital for Sick Children, London in 1896, and then at the Physiology department of the London Hospital, in which he remained till 1900. There, he worked under Dr Leonard Erskine Hill, a well-known British physician and physiologist. He was also appointed as house physician to Sir Thomas Barlow at the Hospital for Sick Children in 1897. Later, he was appointed as full physician to the Royal London Hospital and to the Hospital for Sick Children in 1900, after having served as Assistant Physician to the London Hospital for about six years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1903. During World War I, he served as medical advisor to the Ministry of Food, England.

He was one of the founding editors of the Quarterly Journal of Medicine which was established in 1907.

Teaching

Dr Hutchison is remembered by his students for his "ability to express in concise and fastidious language his extraordinary powers of clinical observation". While teaching to his students on the bed-side, he was known to be witty, which sometimes seemingly "reached towards sadism". Nevertheless, he was respected and loved by his students who were "entranced by his incisive comments on ward-rounds", and were attracted to "his individual method of teaching", which they found "was really in part a pose, an assumption of cynicism, that failed to hide a mind that was intellectually gay and a heart that felt deeply for all human suffering, especially the sufferings of children".

Honours and recognitions

In 1904 he delivered the prestigious Goulstonian lectures on anaemia of infancy to the Royal College of Physicians and in 1931 gave their Harveian Oration. In 1931 he was made Hon FRCP (Ed). He also received the LLD of University of Edinburgh and University of Birmingham, the Hon DSc of University of Oxford and the Hon MD of University of Melbourne. He was the president of the Royal Society of Medicine from 1934 to 1935 and of the Royal College of Physicians from 1938 to 1941.

On 6 July 1939 he was created the 1st Baronet Hutchison, of Thurle, Parish of Streatley, Berkshire (UK). In 1951 the Archives of Disease in Childhood, an international peer-reviewed journal for health professionals and researchers on childhood illnesses, published an issue in his honour.

Published works

The most well known among the books that Sir Robert Hutchison authored is probably his "Clinical Methods", which he first published in 1897, while working as Assistant Physician in the Royal London Hospital. He subsequently saw through the next 13 editions of the book, with the help, for the first eight editions, of Dr Harry Rainy MA FRCP (Ed) FRSE, who was a tutor of Clinical Medicine at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, and later with Dr Donald Hunter, a British physician, and then from 1949, with Dr Donald Hunter and Dr Richard Bomford. The 13th edition was published in 1956 by Dr Donald Hunter and Dr Richard Bomford without Dr Hutchison's assistance. The book has been translated into many languages. The book is considered a standard book of reference on clinical skills for medical students, and is now in its 23rd edition.

His another well known book, the "Food and the Principles of Dietetics", was published in 1900. In 1904, he also published a book on paediatric diseases, the "Lectures on Diseases of Children". In 1951, marking Dr Hutchison's 80th birthday, the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a peer reviewed medical journal, listed his 14 books and 260 other writings on paediatric subjects in its issue.

Personal life

The Hutchisons lived in London until 1940, when their home was bombed in the Nazi air-raid on London. They moved to Streatley in Berkshire after that.

Dr Hutchison had to undergo a gastrojejunostomy at the age of 48 in 1929, for a duodenal ulcer with which he had been suffering for about 20 years. Four years later, he developed Progressive muscular atrophy, which caused weakness of his muscles. He retired from hospital practice in 1934. He died in 1960 at the age of 88.

In 1905 Dr Hutchison had married Dr Laetitia Nora Ede, the daughter of Rev. William Moore Ede and a newly qualified doctor at The London Hospital. They had five children. One child died at birth, and a son who was a medical student at the University of Oxford, died of an infection that he contracted in the anatomy lab. He was survived by two sons and one daughter.

Personality

Hutchison was tall, gaunt and appeared rather stooping. His students found his wit to be "caustic" sometimes, reaching "towards sadism in such alliterative condemnations of themselves as a curious collection of crapulous cretins creeping from crib to crib", and making "a newcomer cringe with such reminders as that 'he was percussing a child’s lung not the cellars in the basement'". Yet, his students respected and admired him because, they "sensed that his individual method of teaching was really in part a pose, an assumption of cynicism, that failed to hide a mind that was intellectually gay and a heart that felt deeply for all human suffering, especially the sufferings of children, though seldom for the sufferings of a candidate for the College Membership".

Many of Dr Hutchison’s clinical sayings became popular with his contemporaries and future generations. Of these the most popular is the one that Dr Hutchison wrote in 1953 as a petition to God:

Dr Donald Hunter, a British physician who had helped to found the British Paediatric Association in 1928, and had worked with Dr Hutchison, wrote after his death, "In Robert Hutchison Scotland presented to England a young man who was destined to become a superb physician, an eminent scholar, a great writer, a most inspiring teacher, a shrewd and gifted clinician, and above all a most kindly gentleman... (who) remained always modest and unassuming... (and) inspired real affection in those with whom he worked. His shafts of wit sent home his teaching points and his powers of instruction inspired a large number of physicians and paediatricians ... (He was) a tall, slightly stooping, rather gaunt figure, dignified and somewhat austere, but a little sorrowful...".