The Story of John M’Neil (1911). Introduction More than a decade before the 1923 Stopes v Sutherland trial, Dr Halliday Sutherland produced one of the most remarkable — and little-known — innovations in British medicine: the country’s first public health cinema education film, The Story of John M’Neil (1911). Made while Sutherland was Medical Officer…

Introduction In the early 1920s, Marie Stopes distributed contraceptive devices under two striking brand names: “Prorace” and “Racial.” To many modern readers, these labels appear jarring—yet in Stopes’s time, they were meant to be reassuring, signalling scientific respectability and alignment with the fashionable goal of “improving the race.” These brand names were not incidental nor…