Robert McCarrison

Sir Robert McCarrison, MA, MD, DSc, LLD, FRCP (15 March 1878 – 18 May 1960) was a Northern Ireland physician and nutritionist, who was made a Companion of the Indian Empire (C.I.E.) in 1923, received a knighthood in July 1933, and was appointed as Honourable Physician to the King in 1935.

McCarrison was born in Portadown, in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. He qualified in Medicine at Queen's College, Belfast in 1900. He joined the Indian Medical Service and was posted as Medical Officer to Indian troops guarding the mountainous Northern Frontiers. He was promoted to Captain in January 1904, to Major in July 1912, Lieutenant-Colonel in January 1918, Colonel from 1929, and to Major-General in July 1933. He retired from the Indian Medical Service on 19 August 1935. McCarrison's research in India on the cause of goiter won widespread recognition and in 1913 he was promoted to do research. In 1928 he became Director of Nutritional Research in India, where he remained until his retirement from the Indian Medical Service in 1935, when he returned to England, settling at Oxford.

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.

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