John Sutherland was born at Latheronwheel, in Caithness, Scotland, the only child of Donald Sutherland, landowner, and Kathleen Bremner, nurse, who died before his second birthday. He was largely brought up in Glasgow by his uncle and aunt, though returning to his father in Caithness over school vacations. He attended the Glasgow High School, where he met Patricia Campbell, who became his wife in 1944, and began medical studies at the University of Glasgow in 1938. After graduation in 1943 he worked at the Western Infirmary, Glasgow, as RMO to Douglas Kinchin Adams, a physician with strong neurological interests. Then followed service as a Surgeon-Lieutenant in a destroyer in the Mediterranean Fleet and with the Fleet Air Arm at Portsmouth. After demobilisation in 1946 he returned to the Western Infirmary for neurological training under Douglas Adams and John Gaylor and commenced the clinical and laboratory studies on multiple sclerosis which culminated in a Doctorate of Medicine (with high commendation) from the University of Glasgow in 1950. He then worked as a senior registrar, first at Inverness and later at Aberdeen, functioning as the de facto neurologist for the North of Scotland and the Hebrides. During these years he carried out the studies on the epidemiology of multiple sclerosis in Northern Scotland (Brain 1956; 79: 635) which brought him international recognition as providing the first good evidence for genetic factors in the pathogenesis of the disorder.

Whilst competing with numbers of time-expired senior registrars for a consultant post in the United Kingdom, he applied for, and was appointed to, a senior lectureship in medicine in the University of Queensland, and emigrated to Australia in late 1956. In Brisbane he rapidly established a professional friendship with Kenneth Jamieson, recently appointed neurosurgeon to the Brisbane General (Royal Brisbane) Hospital. At the end of 1959 he resigned from the University and commenced private consulting practice in neurology in Selby House, Wickham Terrace, becoming the first senior visiting neurologist appointed to Royal Brisbane and the Royal Children’s Hospitals, and being appointed part-time lecturer (later Honorary Reader) in neurology in the University of Queensland.

John Sutherland brought to consultant neurological practice in Queensland the strong academic traditions of a centuries-old Scottish medical school. He strove for the highest quality of professional practice, but recognised that more than this was needed to advance neurology. Whilst coping with an ever expanding consultant practice, and serving on local and national committees, he introduced a mode of unofficial teaching into Royal Brisbane Hospital (RBH) which rapidly became extraordinarily popular with a generation of medical students and junior hospital staff. The Tooth Lecture Theatre at RBH often overflowed during his demonstrations, modelled on those of Byrom Bramwell in Edinburgh early in the century. Various university departments protested that their students mysteriously disappeared from all allocated activities every Thursday afternoon at 4.00pm. The notes distributed at these sessions formed the basis of John Sutherland's own later small textbook Fundamentals of Neurology. During those busy years he also co-authored two other books, The Epilepsies – Modern Diagnosis and Treatment (with Tait and Eadie) and Exercises in Neurological Diagnosis (with Tyrer and Eadie), each of which went to three editions. He also continued to publish clinical and epidemiological research on a variety of neurological topics, particularly multiple sclerosis, being the first to show that in a Southern Hemisphere country, as in the Northern Hemisphere, the prevalence of the disorder increased with increasing distance from the equator.

Twenty years of immense and sustained endeavour saw John Sutherland build neurology at RBH into a speciality with an international reputation, and greatly enhance the status of medicine within the Hospital. He then retired to the quieter world of Toowoomba. Several of the colleagues with whom he had been associated in practice (Kenneth Jamieson and the psychiatrists Howard Tait and Bill Hamilton) had died shortly before, as had also John's only son, lain, in a parachuting accident. In partial retirement in Toowoomba he continued to see referred patients and expanded the medico-legal work in which he had become increasingly interested. There he wrote an autobiography, A far off sunlit place, originally intended for his grand-daughters, but made available to a wider readership in 1989.

Death from myocardial infarction came upon him suddenly in his 76th year, with his mental powers undimmed, his ability to quote Shakespeare or a Latin phrase unimpaired, and with a book attempting to make neurology intelligible for the legal profession prepared to an advanced draft stage. He was survived by his wife, Patricia, his daughter, Gillian, two granddaughters, by a school of clinical neurology in Brisbane and a reputation as the pioneer of neuroepidemiology in Australia.