George Sutherland was born at Old Machar, Aberdeen, the son of Rev. James Sutherland, D.D. He was educated at Aberdeen Gymnasium and University, graduating in arts in 1882, before taking up the study of medicine at Edinburgh University. After graduating as M.B., C.M., in 1886 and a visit to Vienna, he held house appointments at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and Royal Maternity Hospital and at the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital in London. Having made two voyages to Australia as a ship’s surgeon, he was elected to the staff of the last; and children’s diseases became, with cardiology, one of the main interests of his career. He was the author of The Treatment of Disease in Children (1907) and The Heart in Early Life (1914). Sutherland was also connected, for varying periods, with the North-West London Hospital, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital and the North London Consumption Hospital, and in the 1914-1918 War acted as consulting physician to the Royal Air Force, receiving the C.B.E. for his services in 1920. He was Lumleian Lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians in 1917. Sutherland was a bachelor with a strong element of Scottish reserve. But he was a good companion, with his dry wit and partiality for friendly argument. He was a keen golfer. He died at Amersham, some ten years after retiring.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1939; B.M.J., 1939]