Dr Thomas Stuttaford
Norfolk GP and former Conservative MP who became better known as a medical correspondent
DR THOMAS STUTTAFORD, who has died aged 87, was from 1970 to 1974 Conservative MP for Norwich South, but he was best known as a sage and urbanely good-humoured medical correspondent who wrote for The Oldie for 26 years and The Times for nearly 30 years, as well as for numerous other publications.
The son and grandson of doctors, Stuttaford was a gentleman general practitioner of the old school who combined comprehensive knowledge with deep sympathy for, and fascination with, human frailty in all its manifestations.
Unsurprisingly for a gregarious man who belonged to half a dozen clubs, one of his favourite topics – to which in 1998 he devoted a book, To Your Good Health! – was the beneficial effect of moderate drinking, which he credited with bringing “longer and intellectually brighter life”.
Readers of The Oldie took great comfort from his suggested upper limit of four (sensibly sized) glasses of red wine a day, while he assured them that “ancient medical authorities, the Bible, and much reputable recent research all show that small quantities of alcohol can have a beneficial influence on the cardiovascular system, and even overall mortality”. His own consumption was half a bottle of wine in the evening and a drink before dinner.
He was alive to the psychological hazards of drinking, cautioning that “alcohol is a poor anti-depressant”. On the other hand, “if you are not angry or feeling savage with the world when you drink, you are going to get on better with your family and be more sociable with your friends.”
There was no topical medical matter that could not be illuminated by Stuttaford’s wide experience, and the speed with which he could turn out a few hundred incisive words provided inspiration for Private Eye’s “A Doctor Writes” column. (Nevertheless, the Eye’s former editor Richard Ingrams trusted Stuttaford’s advice “implicitly”, and when he founded The Oldie in 1992 he brought the doctor in as a regular columnist.)
In 1982, soon after Stuttaford had started writing for The Times, the Queen Mother was taken to hospital to have a fish bone removed from her throat. He reminisced that “25 years ago, when religious customs were still observed, casualty officers expected Friday to be fishbones-in-thethroat day”. And, deploying what would become his characteristic reassuring sprinkling of medical terminology, he explained: “The usual site for a sharp foreign body to stick is around the tonsillar beds; it can be removed after using 5 per cent cocaine as a local anaesthetic.”
In 1997, with refreshing frankness, Stuttaford reported from his own hospital bed on radical surgery he had undergone after a diagnosis of prostate cancer. Over subsequent years he would campaign vigorously for the early diagnosis and rapid treatment of cancers in the NHS.
Irving Thomas Stuttaford was born at Horning in the Norfolk Broads on May 4 1931, the second son of Dr WJE Stuttaford, MC, and the former Marjorie Royden. He was educated at Town Close prep school, Norwich, then Gresham’s School, Holt, where he read “a book a day”, and was head boy and captain of rugby. From there he went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, to read Medicine.
He did his National Service with the 10th Royal Hussars (1953-55) and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. For the next five years, he served with the Scottish Horse, a TA yeomanry regiment.
He qualified as a doctor in 1959, took junior houseman appointments at Hammersmith Hospital for a couple of years and in 1960 entered his uncle’s NHS practice in rural east Norfolk, where, alongside modern pharmaceuticals, traditional remedies were still used, such as a touch of ginger (Zingiber BP) to “bring up the wind”. Years later, in a column on senna pods for constipation, he recalled that when his father returned to practise in Norfolk after the First World War he was presented with a senna tree on the ground that “no doctor should be without one”. In the mid-1960s he set up his own practice, a partnership, in Norwich.
Despite his fondness for waistcoats and pinstriped suits, Stuttaford was genuinely motivated by a concern to improve the lives of the less fortunate, and having been on Blofield and Flegg District Council from 1964 to 1966, he was elected to Norwich City Council in 1969 and to Parliament in 1970. He was a member of the select committee on science and technology, and, though on the Left of the Tory party, was “very pro” Margaret Thatcher.
He lost his seat in the general election of February 1974 to Labour’s John Garrett, and unsuccessfully contested the Isle of Ely in the October election, then again in 1979.
Meanwhile from the early 1970s he worked for Bupa, the London Hospital, Queen Mary’s Hospital for the East End and Moorfields Eye Hospital. He acted as medical adviser to a number of large companies such as Barclays Bank.
He spent many years working in “VD clinics”, as they were known, and in his seventies brought this experience to bear on a regular column giving kind and calmly factual answers to queries on sexual matters, such as “I’ve felt an urge to try on my mum’s Lycra leggings. Is this unhealthy?”
He advised The Sunday Times over its thalidomide campaign and served as vice president of Prostate UK. Among his other publications were a pocket book of signs and symptoms called What’s Up Doc? (2003), and Stress and How to Avoid It (2004).
His chief hobbies were ornithology and restoring old houses. But he carried on writing to the end. In one of his last Oldie columns, he remembered meeting Nye Bevan and lamented that “the autocratic, distant and officious control of medicine is destroying the NHS”.
He was appointed OBE in 1996.
Tom Stuttaford’s wife Pam (née Ropner), whom he married in 1957, died in 2013; their three sons survive him.
Dr Thomas Stuttaford, born May 4 1931, died June 8 2018