Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Sutton, Thomas (1767?-1835)

by Edward Irving Carlyle

SUTTON, THOMAS (1767?–1835), medical writer, was born in Staffordshire in 1766 or 1767. He commenced to study medicine in London, whence he proceeded to Edinburgh and finally to Leyden, where he graduated M.D. on 19 June 1787. He was admitted a licentiate of the College of Physicians on 29 March 1790, and soon afterwards was appointed physician to the army. Sutton eventually settled at Greenwich, where he became consulting physician to the Kent dispensary, and died in 1835. He was the first modern British physician to advocate bleeding and an antiphlogistic treatment of fever, and to him is due the discrimination of delirium tremens from the other diseases with which it had previously been confounded.

He was the author of:

1. ‘Considerations regarding Pulmonary Consumption,’ London, 1799, 8vo.
2. ‘Practical Account of a Remittent Fever frequently occurring among the Troops in this Climate,’ Canterbury, 1806, 8vo.
3. ‘Tracts on Delirium Tremens,’ London, 1813, 8vo.
4. ‘Letters to the Duke of York on Consumption,’ London, 1814, 8vo.

[Munk's Coll. of Phys. ii. 399; British and Foreign Medical Review, 1836, i. 44.]

E. I. C.