Hutt , Michael Stewart Rees , 1922-2000 , pathologist

Michael Stewart Rees Hutt, born 1 October 1922; awarded senior lectureship in pathology at St Thomas' Hospital Medical School in London and appointed Professor of Pathology at Makerere University College, Kampala, in Uganda, 1962.

Whilst in Uganda, Hutt organised a country-wide postal pathology system so that remote hospitals received diagnoses in time to be meaningful; enabled one of the few excellent tropical country cancer registries to be set up and stimulated much medical research. Hutt and Dennis Burkitt made a road safari around the mission and government hospitals of Uganda and eastern Zaire, mid-1960s, gathering cancer incidence data. This work on illnesses including Burkitt's lymphoma, oesophageal and liver cancer was important in demonstrating that cancer is a very non-uniform disease. Hutt's work regarding a tumour called Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) showed that on the Uganda/Zaire border it accounted for 10 per cent of all tumours among adults, this occurred prior to the epidemic of HIV and Aids and was a crucial discovery.

Hutt returned to UK in 1970 and became Professor of Geographical Pathology in a unit created for him and Burkitt in St Thomas', developing a system of diagnostic pathology for resource-poor countries. Hutt retired in 1983; continued to press for support of medicine in Africa, especially in Uganda and through the Commonwealth Secretariat organised an umbrella group 'Apecsa, the Association of Pathologists of East, Central and Southern Africa', to reinforce pathology provision and local staff in Africa. Hutt died in Crickhowell, Powys on 29 March 2000.

Publications include: The geography of non-infectious disease (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986) and Kaposi's sarcoma: 2nd Kaposi's Sarcoma Symposium, Kampala, January 8 to 11, 1980 edited by Hutt and others (Karger, New York, 1981).