FEATURE
Unsung hero Charles A. Coulombe remembers a remarkable and wise Catholic convert
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any period dramas set in the England of the 1920s and 30 will mention in passing the rather Dickensian name of Marie Stopes. This lady – the Margaret Sanger of Britain – is usually mentioned as some sort of heroine of freedom. Her main antagonist in real life was a nearly forgotten figure, who unlike Dr Stopes sought to preserve life medically, and improve it, literarily. He was Dr Halliday Sutherland (18821960). Sutherland was a contemporary of G.K. Chesterton, who remarked of his writings that “Dr Halliday Sutherland is a born writer, especially a born story-teller. Dr Sutherland, who is distinguished in medicine, is an amateur in the sense that he only writes when he has nothing better to do. But when he does, it could hardly be done better.” Great praise indeed, from such a writer. Born in Glasgow to a noted doctor and his wife, after attending High School in Glasgow and Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, he followed his father’s profession, receiving his MD in 1908 from Edinburgh University. The elder Sutherland had been Deputy Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland, and spent his career combatting mental illness. Young Halliday would devote his medical career to poor slum dwellers afflicted with tuberculosis – which was particularly lethal among the young. Working closely with Sir Robert William Philip, he started a tuberculosis clinic and an open-air school in the bandstand of Regent's Park in London in 1911. Sutherland also produced in that year “The Story of John McNeil,” a cinema film on preventing and treating tuberculosis among the poor. At that time, around 70,000 succumbed to the disease each year in Britain – and if it was the head of the family who died, all of his dependents were impoverished. Baptised into the Church of Scotland, Dr. Sutherland had lost his faith by this time. In 1914 he enlisted in the Royal Navy. Nevertheless, he continued his battle against tuberculosis. His fury knew no bounds when he discovered that tubercular milk was being knowingly given to and infecting children.
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Addressing the National Council of the YMCA on 4 September, 1917, he said: “Tuberculous milk kills 10,000 children every year and creates an amount of child sickness, suffering and sorrow so widespread as to be incomprehensible to a finite mind, and no more natural than if their food had been poisoned with arsenic. Yet in London to-day, one out of every eleven churns of milk arriving at our railway termini contains this deathdealing bacteria.” Sutherland complained that despite the recommendation for pasteurisation made many years before by a Royal Commission, nothing had been done. Why? Sutherland identified the culprit in one word: Eugenics. As Darwinism became the leading Scientificist dogma during the course of the late 19th century, its child, Social Darwinism, emerged; with the latter came Eugenics – the idea that the human race should be bred “upwards,” like cattle. It became extremely popular amongst the Scientifically-minded – so much so that virtually every environmentalist institution or association a century or more in age has spent the last Wokerypowered two years shredding the memories of their founders – such men as Louis Agassiz, William Hornaday, Luther Burbank, John Muir, and a host of other such figures, who held these views in varying degrees. Even so anodyne a source as the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica preached this gospel in the article “Civilization:” “Equally obvious must it appear to the cosmopolite of some generation of the future that quality rather than mere numbers must determine the efficiency of any given community. Race suicide will then cease to be a bugbear; and it will no longer be considered rational to keep up the census at the cost of propagating low orders of intelligence, to feed the ranks of paupers, defectives and criminals. On the contrary it will be thought fitting that man should become the conscious arbiter of his own racial destiny to the extent of applying whatever laws of heredity he knows or may acquire in the interests of his own species, as he has long applied them in the case of domesticated animals. The
survival and procreation of the unfit will then cease to be a menace to the progress of civilization.” In his struggle against tuberculosis, Sutherland encountered opposition from the ranks of Eugenicists embedded in Britain’s establishment. In 1912, Sir James Barr – president of the British Medical Conference – gave that organisation’s annual conference some interesting guidance on the disease: “Nature … 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.” Four years later, in 1918, Sir James made himself crystal clear: “Until we have some restriction in the marriage of undesirables the elimination of the tubercle bacillus is not worth aiming at. It forms a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit[.] … I am of opinion … that if tomorrow the tubercle bacillus were nonexistent, it would be nothing short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance.” It was this callous, inhuman attitude that Sutherland castigated in his 1917 speech as that of “race breeders with the souls of cattle-breeders.” From that time on he would be the sworn enemy of the Eugenicists and the misery they caused. After the War he began reading the CTS pamphlets at Westminster Cathedral. As he put it: “The pamphlets shook all my preconceptions. Apart from their unique and tremendous claim that this was the one true infallible Church of God, I discovered that most of what I had hitherto heard or thought about the Church was false. I discovered that this Church, accredited with superstition and idolatry, was apparently engaged in upholding the dignity of human reason in a world of chaos. Nay, more, it seemed as if my own Protestantism, and the weakness thereof, had been based on
SUMMER 2022
