By Sir Robert McCarrison, MD
Summary: Dr. Robert McCarrison is one of the true giants of early nutrition research. As a member of Britain's Indian Medical Service in the first decades of the twentieth century, he conducted the first studies demonstrating the effects of vitamin-deficient diets on animal tissues and organs—at a time when little or nothing was known about the vitamins. In this 1927 excerpt from the transactions of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, McCarrison peppers the pages with memorable quotes, setting the basic principles of nutrition that, were they ever heeded by his fellow physicians, would have changed the way medicine is practiced today. "Obsessed with the idea of the microbe," he writes, "we often forget the most fundamental of all rules for the physician, that the right kind of food is the most important single factor in the promotion of health and the wrong kind of food the most important single factor in the promotion of disease." In particular, McCarrison focuses on the "minor manifestations" of vitamin deficiency as harbingers of disease with which every good doctor should be familiar. "I emphasize these minor manifestations of malnutrition because they represent the beginnings of disease, and their recognition is, to my way of thinking, vastly more important than that of the wreckages of health, which even the man in the street can see, though his name for them may be less sonorous than our own." You will find much more about and by this true pioneer of nutrition within these archives. From Transactions of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, England, 1927.
View PDF: Diseases of Faulty Nutrition
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