People of Achievement
People of Achievement
Sir Clifford Allbutt, MA, MD Cantab. (1836 - 1925)
Dr (later Sir) Clifford Allbutt was born in Dewsbury, educated at York and studied in Cambridge. He was Physician at the General Infirmary at Leeds and member of Council of the School of Medicine from 1864 to 1884. He was twice President of the School. He introduced the ophthalmoscope, weighing machine and microscope to the wards and in 1867 invented the clinical thermometer as we know it today. It was 3 inches in length compared to a model developed elsewhere in England which was one foot long (see picture).
The novelist George Eliot described him as a ‘good, clever and graceful man, enough to enable one to be cheerful under the horrible smoke of ugly Leeds,’ and is regarded generally as the model for George Eliot’s Dr Lydgate in Middlemarch.
 Allbutt's clinical thermometer |
As a physician he had a considerable reputation in Leeds but he also developed an interest in the care and treatment of the mentally ill and between 1889 and 1892 he was a Commissioner for Lunacy in England and Wales. In 1892 he became Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge where he edited his vast System of Medicine which was for many years the ‘doctor’s bible’.
He was elected FRS, knighted, received no fewer than nine honorary degrees and served on many government bodies.
Sir Clifford Allbutt has been commemorated with a Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque, which was unveiled on his former home, now Lyddon Hall, on the Leeds University campus.
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