Born in Edinburgh on August 5th, 1881, the only child of George Sutherland Coutts, a bank manager, and Lizzie McD, of Streatham. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School from 1895-1899, when he left with the school scholarship to St Thomas's Hospital. He held the posts of Resident House Surgeon, House Surgeon to Out-patients under Sir Charles Ballance, Clinical Assistant in the Throat Department, and Assistant Lecturer in Practical Surgery. He had also been Prosector to the Society of Apothecaries. He then went to Egypt, and for two years held the post of Resident Surgical Officer of the Kasr-el-Aini Hospital in Cairo. In January, 1909, he settled in practice at Norwich, in partnership with Thomas Herbert Morse (qv). In May, 1911, he was elected an Assistant Surgeon to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, and during three months amply justified this appointment by the skill which he displayed as an operator. His death was painfully unexpected. Within five minutes of his death Coutts, apparently quite well, was conversing with his wife, when he was suddenly seized with a general convulsion, the result, probably, of some gross intracerebral lesion, previously unsuspected, and passed away unconscious in the space of a few minutes at his residence, 29 Surrey Street, Norwich, on August 21st, 1911. His widow and daughter survived him. At the time of his death he was Hon Consulting Surgeon to the Cromer Cottage Hospital and to the Victoria Hospital, Swaffham. Publication: "Endemic Funiculitis." - *Lancet*, 1909, i, 227.