| Description | Meiklejohn was born in 1909 in Harpenden. He went with a science scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, and graduated B.Sc. in 1931, with first-class honours in physiology.
At St. Mary's Hospital, London, he gathered further academic distinctions, including a Radcliffe Scholarship and a Peabody Travelling Fellowship which took him to America for three years, where he worked with several leading physicians, including Castle and George Minot. He took the BM, BCh in 1935, and MD in 1949.
During the war he was nutrition adviser to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and in 1946 he was appointed senior lecturer in nutrition at the University of Edinburgh, which post he held at the time of his death. In 1949 he was elected to Membership of the Royal College of Physicians of London on the record of his published work. His publications were numerous and impressive, in both the British and American literature, and mainly concerned disorders of metabolism. In 1959 he was joint author with Sir Stanley Davidson and Reginald Passmore of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, which Professor L. J. Witts, in a review in the British Medical Journal, called ' a major addition to the textbooks of medical science," and which became a standard work.
Meiklejohn was well-known for his compassion and even before the days of the National Health Service he could not accept a fee from a patient. This humanitarianism made it appropriate that his lectureship was in nutrition, for his primary interest was not in the diseases whereby men die but in the magic of the substances whereby they live.
He died in a fishing accident on June 14 1961.
[Source: Obituary, British Medical Journal]
Contents: Papers on nutritional research, 1925-1961; correspondence, 1942-1960; reprints, 1927-1961; notebook, 1932; certificate, 1960; histology slides, 1928-1933 |