Sir Michael Llewellyn Rutter (15 August 1933 – 23 October 2021) was the first person to be appointed professor of child psychiatry in the United Kingdom.
[1] Rutter was professor of developmental psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, and consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, a post he held from 1966 until retiring in July 2021.
He continued his studies at the University of Birmingham Medical School, originally intending to become a GP and join his father in his practice.
Rutter is also recognized as contributing centrally to the establishment of child psychiatry as a medical and biopsychosocial specialty with a solid scientific base.
He amassed further evidence, addressed the many different underlying social and psychological mechanisms and showed that Bowlby was only partially right and often for the wrong reasons.
The importance of these refinements of the maternal deprivation hypothesis was to reposition it as a "vulnerability factor" rather than a causative agent, with a number of varied influences determining which path a child will take.
[15][17] After the end of Nicolae Ceauşescu's regime in Romania in 1989, Rutter led the English and Romanian Adoptees Study Team, following many of the orphans adopted into Western families into their teens in a series of substantial studies on the effects of early privation and deprivation across multiple domains affecting child development including attachment and the development of new relationships.
[18] In June 2014, Rutter was the guest on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific, in which he described himself as a Nontheist Quaker, as well as revealing that, at the age of 80, he still worked each day "from about half past eight until about four".
[19] Rutter was professor of developmental psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London and consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, a post he held since 1966, until retiring in July 2021.
In 1983 he gave the annual Swarthmore Lecture to a large gathering of British Quakers, attending their Yearly Meeting, later published as A Measure of Our Values: goals and dilemmas in the upbringing of children.