Leonard Guthrie was born in Kensington, the second son of Thomas Anstey Guthrie, and his wife Augusta, and educated at King’s College School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated in classics in 1880. He studied medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and, after qualifying in 1886, obtained house appointments at the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital and the Great Northern Centra] Hospital. He was elected to the honorary staff of the former, and children’s diseases became, with neurology, one of the chief interests of his career. His other main connection was with the Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis, Maida Vale, and he was also assistant physician to the North-West London Hospital for a time. His main work was Functional Nervous Disorders of Childhood (1907), and he contributed to the System of Medicine and to Garrod, Batten and Thursfield’s Diseases of Children. He was FitzPatrick Lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians in 1907-08 and acted as secretary of the College committee for the revision of the Nomenclature of Diseases. He was appointed as an examiner by his old University. Guthrie was a man who, in the words of a colleague, " loved young people and old things ", a self-effacing scholar, and, although himself a bachelor, an adept in gaining the confidence of his young patients.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1919. 1919; Al.Oxon., ii, 578]