Halliday Gibson Sutherland (1882–1960) was a Scottish medical doctor, writer, opponent of eugenics and the producer of Britain's first public health education cinema film in 1911.
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.
[7] After the war he held the following posts:[7] Sutherland was President of the Tuberculosis Society of Great Britain and an honorary physician to, and council member of, the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium Fund.
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.
Everything which tends to check the multiplication of the unfit, to emphasize that the fertility of the physically and mentally healthy, will pro tanto aid Nature’s method of reducing the phthisical death-rate.
Nature, on the other hand, weeds out those who have not got the innate power of recovery from disease, and by means of the tubercle bacillus and other pathogenic organisms she frequently does this before the reproductive age, so that a check is put on the multiplication of idiots and the feeble-minded.
Nature's methods are thus of advantage to the race rather than to the individual.”The first evidence of Sutherland's opposition to eugenics appeared in a November 1912 article in the British Medical Journal: "The Seed or the Soil in Tuberculosis".
There are some self-styled eugenists – whom you sir, from your pulpit have castigated as race-breeders with the soul of cattle-breeders – who declaim that the prevention of disease is not in itself a good thing.
And I do know that those evil conditions which will kill a child within a few months of birth, and slay another when he reaches the teens, will destroy yet another when he comes to adult life.
Under oath, she explained the purpose of the society that had been set up to run the clinic: “The object of the Society is, if possible, to counteract the steady evil which has been growing for a good many years of the reduction of the birth rate just on the part of the thrifty, wise, well-contented, and the generally sound members of our community, and the reckless breeding from the C.3 end, and the semi-feebleminded, the careless, who are proportionately increasing in our community because of the slowing of the birth rate at the other end of the social scale.
Statistics show that every year the birth rate from the worst end of our community is increasing in proportion to the birth rate at the better end, and it was in order to try to right that grave social danger that I embarked upon this work.”[23]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".
It began:[25] “Birth control, in the sense of the prevention of pregnancy by chemical, mechanical or other artificial means, is being widely advocated as a sure method of lessening poverty and of increasing the physical and mental health of the nation.
Under the headings "Specially Hurtful to the Poor" and "Exposing the Poor to Experiment", Sutherland 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 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 midwives, and on Infant Welfare Centres – it is truly amazing that this monstrous campaign of birth control should be tolerated by the Home Secretary.
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.
[20] 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.
The result, Irish Journey, includes an account of Dr Sutherland's visit to the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam and the Magdalene Laundry in Galway in April 1955.
"[30] 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.
In the bad old days, when Ireland was subject to the foreign power of England, the parish priest was probably the only educated man in an Irish village.
Ireland is certainly a wonderful show place, and heaven may reflect Killarney; but as a Scotsman I think Loch Lomond, twenty miles from Glasgow, is more beautiful.
The “Catholic Medical Guardian” of London gave my book an excellent review and said that my account of the assault on myself in a Tipperary hotel recalled the best chapters in “Handy Andy”.