Robert McCarrison

Pioneer in nutrition research

McCarrison carried out the very first experiments to demonstrate the effect of nutrition on the epidemiology of disease.

McCarrison is credited with being the first to experimentally demonstrate the effect of deficient dietaries upon animal tissues and organs. He also carried out human experiments aimed at identifying the cause of goitre, and included himself as one of the experimental subjects. Much of McCarrison's work was pioneering. His 1921 book Studies in Deficiency Disease was considered notable at the time, being published at a time when knowledge of vitamins and their role in nutrition was crystallizing. McCarrison himself noted that prior to publication of his studies on the pathogenesis of deficiency disease "no systemic post-mortem examination of animals fed on food deficient in vitamin B had ever been made; the histopathological effects of such food on the various systems of the body were wholly unknown; above all, its effects on the gastro-intestinal tract and the organs of digestion and assimilation, and the significance of these effects for clinical medicine, were wholly unsuspected".

At age 23, McCarrison went to India, where he spent 30 years on nutritional problems. He attained the rank of major-general in the Indian Medical Service, and founded the Nutritional Research Laboratories in Coonoor. After retiring from the Indian Medical Service in 1935, he gave a series of Cantor lectures at the Royal Society of Arts, about the influence of diet on health. This comprised three lectures delivered on successive Mondays at the Society. The first lecture focused on the processes of nutrition; the second, on food essentials and their relationship to bodily structure and function; the third on disease prevention and physique improvement by attention to diet. The lectures were subsequently published in book form under the title Nutrition and Health, and at the time of the third edition in 1962, were still not seen as "dated", with the advances of the preceding 25 years largely filling the details of the principles previously recognised by McCarrison.

"McCarrison's work on goitre, cretinism, and the thyroid, begun in the western Himalayas in 1902, generated scores of scientific publications during the following thirty-five years", While McCarrison's work is often considered the start of serious studies of goitre and cretinism in South Asia, it was preceded by that of Commissioner David Scott at Rangur in north-east India around 1825, and was investigated by Mountford Bramley at Kathmandu in 1832.

In 1918, McCarrison founded the Beri-Beri Enquiry Unit in a single room laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Conoor, India. He was invalided to Britain from 1920–1922, and in 1923 the enquiry was axed on financial grounds. It was restored two years later as the Deficiency Disease Inquiry, which McCarrison headed from 1925-1929. Around 1928-29, this developed further into the Nutrition Research Laboratories (NRL. Renamed the National Institute of Nutrition in 1969), with McCarrison as its first Director, until his retirement in 1935. In 1926, as head of the Deficiency Diseases Inquiry, McCarrison submitted written and oral evidence on malnutrition to the Royal Commission on Agriculture in India. The primary objective of McCarrison's submission was to indicate the significance of malnutrition as a "as a cause of physical inefficiency and ill-health among the massess in India"; the relationship between nutrition and agriculture; and "the necessity for closer co-ordination of nutritional, medical, veterinary and agricultural research" in India. McCarrison's submission had impact. "A decade later, when the Commission's chairman, Lord Linlithgow, became Viceroy of India he showed a personal interest in nutrition, pushing it to the top of the research agenda. In 1936 a Nutrition Advisory Committee was established and roughly a tenth of IRFA's annual grants went to fund nutrition research at Coonoor and Calcutta".

Retirement from India

After the Second World War, from 1945 to 1955, McCarrison served as director of postgraduate medical education at Oxford University.

Personal life

In 1906 he married Helen Stella Johnston, to whom he was still married at the time of his death.

Legacy

McCarrison Society

In 1966, a group of doctors, dentists and veterinarians, interested in the promotion of nutrition and health, founded the McCarrison Society in honour of his efforts, with a Scottish group established in 1981 due to both travel logistics and differing needs in the Scottish population.

The Society aims "to assemble scientific knowledge on nutrition and health that is free from economic and political pressures with the object of securing the physical and mental health of future generations". The Society meetings sometimes raise questions with elusive answers, with speakers presenting material based on scanty, often anectdotal data, inviting criticism that it is "a gathering of cranks". However, "one answer to that criticism is that speakers at MCarrison meetings tend to be rather well qualified. But the main point is that the society has a way of asking questions about the environment - what are we doing to it and what it is doing to us - that are of profound importance".

The Society's website summarises McCarrison's work thus:

His researches were extensive; they included work on the newly discovered vitamins and on the contrasting disease patterns in the Indian subcontinent. He demonstrated how many common diseases increasingly prevalent in industrial societies were caused simply by diets made defective by extensive food processing, often with the use of chemical additives. He deplored the universal consumption in Britain and America of refined white flour, instead of halite flour, and the substitution of canned, preserved and artificially sweetened products for fresh natural food.

Publications

The following is a selection of works published by McCarrison. To avoid duplication, this does not include works cited, which are to be found in the References section.