Thomas Clifford Allbutt

Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt KCB, MA, MD, ScD, FRS (20 July 183622 February 1925) was an English physician best known for his role as president of the British Medical Association 1920, for inventing the clinical thermometer, and for supporting Sir William Osler in founding the History of Medicine Society.

Biography Thomas Clifford Allbutt was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, the son of Rev. Thomas Allbutt, Vicar of Dewsbury and his wife Marianne, daughter of Robert Wooler, of Dewsbury (1801–1843). He was educated at St Peter's School, York and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1859, with a First Class degree in natural sciences in 1860.

After studying medicine at St George's Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, London, and taking the Cambridge MB degree in 1861, he went to Paris

In 1870 Allbutt published Medical Thermometry, an article outlining the history of thermometry and describing his invention: a clinical thermometer approximately 6 inches in length that a physician could have habitually in a pocket. His version of the thermometer, devised in 1867, was manufactured by the company Harvey & Reynolds founded by Leeds Quaker and chemist Thomas Harvey, and quickly adopted elsewhere, instead of the model previously in use, which was one foot long and which patients were required to hold for about twenty minutes.

Allbutt conducted some of his work at the nearby West Riding Asylum, Wadsley. In his monograph On the Use of the Ophthalmoscope in Diseases of the Nervous System and of the Kidneys (1871), Allbutt included an appendix of two hundred and fourteen cases of insanity he had observed with an ophthalmoscope at the asylum. He found changes in the eye in a large proportion of those diagnosed with old or organic cases of brain disease. He argued use of the ophthalmoscope would help remove 'the metaphysical or transcendental habit of thought' and bring a 'more vigorous and more philosophical mode of investigation' to disorders of the brain.

His other work included initiating and encouraging the practice of consultation between medical witnesses before the hearing of legal cases. In 1884 he gave the Goulstonian Lectures 'Chapters on visceral neuroses' at the Royal College of Physicians. In 1885 he introduced the surgical treatment of tuberculous glands in the neck. In an address at Glasgow in 1888 he urged the study of comparative medicine, proposing that information gained by observing the physiology and diseases of animals could often be applied to human medicine.

From 1889 to 1892 he was a Commissioner for Lunacy in England and Wales, and he moved from Leeds to London. In 1892 he moved to Cambridge on becoming Regius Professor of Physic in the University of Cambridge, where he edited his System of Medicine, a work which a biographer has described as 'his greatest service to contemporary medicine'. It was published in eight volumes, 1896 to 1899, with a second edition in eleven volumes, 1905 to 1911.

Allbutt continued as regius professor of physic at Cambridge until his death in 1925 when Sir Humphry Rolleston, Physician-in-Ordinary to King George V was elected as his successor.

Allbutt's article had revised the version in the 10th edition (1902) contributed by Joseph Frank Payne, and Allbutt's was in turn revised and updated in two parts for the 14th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (volume 15), one part Medicine, General, by Rolleston, the other part Medicine, History of, by Charles Singer, Lecturer in the History of Medicine, University of London.

Allbutt supported Sir William Osler in the founding of the History of Medicine Society at the Royal Society of Medicine in 1912.