Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt (20 July 1836 – 22 February 1925) was a British physician and inventor of the clinical thermometer.

Thomas Clifford Allbutt was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, the son of Rev. Thomas Allbutt, Vicar of Dewsbury and Mary Anne Wooler (1801 - 1843). He was educated at St Peter's School, York, and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1859, with a First Class degree in natural sciences in 1860.

Allbutt's invention of the clinical thermometer was widely welcomed because, beforehand, patients were required to hold a one - foot - long thermometer in their hands which took about twenty minutes for an acceptable measurement to be taken of their body temperature.

Allbutt became regius professor of physic (an archaic word for medicine) at the University of Cambridge in 1892 and was knighted in 1907. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1922. He died in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, in 1925. He had no children.