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Halliday Gibson Sutherland was born in Glasgow on 24th June 1882. He was educated at Glasgow High School and Merchiston Castle School.

In 1920 he married Muriel Fitzpatrick. They had six children and lived at 5 Stafford Terrace, Kensington in London.

Medical Career

Books

Sutherland wrote a number of books and articles over his career, some of which are listed below. The Arches of the Years published in 1932 was the most successful in commercial terms. It was the ninth bestseller in the United States in 1933 in the Publisher's Weekly list and eventually ran to 35 editions in English and was translated into eight languages.

• Pulmonary Tuberculosis in General Practice (1916)
• Birth Control: The Arches of the Years (1932)
• A Time to Keep (1934)
• Laws of Life (1935)
• In My Path (1936)
• Tuberculin Handbook (1936)
• Lapland Journey (1938)
• Hebridean Journey (1939)
• Southward Journey (1942)
• Control of Life (1944)
• Spanish Journey (1948)
• Irish Journey (1956)

Irish Journey included Dr Sutherland's account of his visit to the Magdalene Laundry in Galway in April 1955, which attracted topical interest in 2013.

Sutherland v. Stopes

In 1922 Sutherland wrote Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine against the Neo-Malthusians. In it, he quoted a letter from Marie Stopes to the Sussex Daily News (published on 17th November). He emphasised a paragraph which read: "That there may be medical men who do not approve of birth control is natural, when one remembers that a doctor has to make his living, and can do so more easily when women are ailing with incessant pregnancies than when they maintain themselves in good health by only having children when fitted to do so. Opinions of medicals, therefore, must be sifted. The best doctors are with us; the self-seeking and the biased may be against us". Sutherland described it as a "malignant attack" on the medical profession.

Later, under the heading "Exposing the Poor to Experiment", he wrote: "In the midst of a London slum a woman, who is a doctor of German philosophy (Munich), has opened a Birth Control Clinic, where working women are instructed in a method of contraception described by Professor McIlroy as "The most harmful method of which I have had experience". When we remember that that millions are being spent by the Ministry of Health and by Local Authorities - on pure milk for necessitous expectant and nursing mothers, on Maternity Clinics to guard the health of mothers before and after childbirth, for the provision of skilled midvives, and on Infant Welfare Centres - it is truly amazing that this monstrous campaign of birth control should be tolerated by the Home Secretary. Charles Bradlaugh was condemned to jail for a less serious crime." It was this paragraph which was the subject of the Sutherland v. Stopes libel case.

The full title of Birth Control was Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine against the Neo-Malthusians. Stopes letter to the Sussex Daily News was in her roles as the "President of the Society for Constructive and Racial Progress". These details reveal the wider issues surrounding the dispute in the context of the times: Eugenics ("the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics") and Malthusianism (".

The case went through the courts. The House of Lords, then the highest court applying to Britain, decided in Sutherland's (and another unnamed defendant's) favour.

References

• British Medical Journal, Obituary Halliday G Sutherland, M.D. April 30, 1960 pages 1368-9
• Halliday Sutherland, Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine against the Neo-Malthusians
• Harley Williams, 'Sutherland, Halliday Gibson (1882-1960)',rev.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press 2004.
• Michael Korda, Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900-1999, Barnes and Noble 2001. ISBN 0-7607-2559-4.
• The Tablet Saturday November 29, 1924
• Misplaced Pages article on Marie Stopes

• Pending AfC submissions
• Pending AfC submissions in article space