Arnold Peter Meiklejohn

Arnold Peter Meiklejohn (1909 – 14 June 1961) was an English physician and academic, specializing in nutrition.

In 1938, he was elected as a Peabody Fellow of the Harvard Medical School and during the Second World War worked for the Rockefeller Foundation and as nutrition adviser to UNRRA. In 1945, shortly after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Meiklejohn was put in charge of administering a starvation diet to the camp's severely malnourished and dying inmates.

After the war, he became a lecturer in nutrition at the University of Edinburgh and in 1947, at the request of the Medical Research Council (MRC), assessed and reported on the state of nutrition of German civilians.

He wrote a number of papers on nutrition, particularly on errors of metabolism, and with Sir Stanley Davidson and R. Passmore was co-author of the textbook Human Nutrition and Dietetics (1959).

Early life Peter Meiklejohn was born in Harpenden in 1909. He attended Gresham's School, where he was a contemporary of W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and John Pudney. From there, he was awarded a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, and in 1931 graduated BSc in physiology with first-class honours. He then gained admission to St Mary's Hospital, London, to study medicine, and in 1935 achieved his B.M., B.Ch. He was then a house physician in the St Mary's Medical Unit, and in 1936 gained a Radcliffe Travelling Fellowship. In 1938, he was elected as a Peabody Fellow of the Harvard Medical School. For three years he worked with leading American physicians who included George Minot and William Bosworth Castle,

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

On 29 April 1945, Meiklejohn arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after its liberation by British forces, with the responsibility of administering the starvation diet to the severely malnourished and dying inmates. 96 and describes the introductory briefing on the challenges they would face, given by Meiklejohn. Other students included Alex Paton who published his memoirs of Belsen in the British Medical Journal in 1981 and David Philip Bowler who later had a career in community child health, for which he was awarded the Advance Australia Award for his work in the care of Aboriginal children. Some of the students memoirs were used by author Ben Shephard in the book After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945. On being questioned about the achievements of the students, Meiklejohn responded that "they had restored the moral order". Generous rich food was not tolerated by inmates who had starved for so long. Despite a number of cookhouses and co-ordinating offices, simply handing out food was not enough. The mixture was much too sweet for eastern Europeans.

Meiklejohn also led the postmortems of some of those that died by starvation and his findings included extreme muscle wasting, swollen ankles and feet, small hearts and fluid around the heart. Almost all of those that had postmortems had tuberculosis (TB) of varying types including miliary tuberculosis and chronic TB. The stomach was sometimes found to be small from atrophy or large from gaseous distension and the large intestine could be atrophied or ulcerated.

In 1959 he co-authored the acclaimed textbook Human Nutrition and Dietetics with Sir Stanley Davidson and R. Passmore.

Known as Peter, and not Arnold, Meiklejohn was married to Jean, and they had two sons, who were small boys at the time of his death on 14 June 1961, in an accident while fishing in a Highland river. He was 51.

His obituary in the British Medical Journal enumerated some of his quirks, saying; "He had many amusing and endearing foibles; there were his oddities of dress, his dilapidated motor-car, his inveterate snuff-taking, and his refusal to drink coffee at lunch as he said it disturbed his post-prandial nap-normally enjoyed on the floor of his room in the Department of Medicine with his head resting on a green velvet pillow specially designed for the purpose."

Selected publications Articles

Books Human Nutrition and Dietetics. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh & London, 1959. . (With Sir S. Davidson and R. Passmore.)