Edward Mellanby: Life and Career

Sir Edward Mellanby (1884–1955) is remembered as the physician whose experiments with puppies, oatmeal and cod liver oil showed that rickets was a disease of diet — work that led directly to the discovery of vitamin D. But the experiments were only one part of a long career. He was a shipyard manager’s son from the north-east of England who trained under Frederick Gowland Hopkins at Cambridge, qualified in medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, held a chair of pharmacology at Sheffield, and then spent sixteen years running the Medical Research Council, Britain’s main public funder of medical science, through the Second World War.

This page tells the story of his life: the family he came from, his teachers, the posts he held, his marriage and lifelong research partnership with the dental scientist May Mellanby, his wartime work, his honours and books, and the man his colleagues described in their obituaries. The science itself is covered only in outline here; each discovery has its own page in this wing, linked in the text and in the Connections list at the bottom.

Table of Contents

  1. A Shipbuilding Family in West Hartlepool
  2. Cambridge and Gowland Hopkins
  3. Medicine at St Thomas’s and Early Research
  4. King’s College for Women and the Rickets Commission
  5. Partnership with May Mellanby
  6. The Sheffield Chair of Pharmacology
  7. Secretary of the Medical Research Council, 1933–1949
  8. Wartime Food Policy
  9. Honours, Lectures and Books
  10. Character, Final Years and Death
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections

1. A Shipbuilding Family in West Hartlepool

Edward Mellanby was born on 8 April 1884 in West Hartlepool, a port and shipbuilding town on the coast of County Durham in north-east England. According to his obituary in the Royal College of Physicians’ Munk’s Roll, his father, John Mellanby, was the manager of a shipyard in the town, and his mother, Mary Lawson, had been born in Edinburgh. Edward was the youngest of six children.

It was a family of unusual scientific talent. Two of Edward’s brothers also became university professors: one held a chair of engineering at Glasgow, and the other, John Mellanby, became a physiologist — first at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and later as professor at Oxford.

In 1898 Edward went on a bursary to Barnard Castle School, a boarding school in the dales of County Durham. From there, in 1902, he won an open exhibition in natural science to Emmanuel College, Cambridge — the step that set the course of his life.

Industrial towns and rickets

There is a quiet irony in his birthplace. Rickets — the softening and bending of growing bones that he would later show to be a deficiency disease — was then common among children in Britain’s smoky industrial towns. The disease that made his name was part of the world he grew up in. The full story of that disease and his experiments is told on the page Edward Mellanby and the Rickets Experiments.

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2. Cambridge and Gowland Hopkins

At Emmanuel College, Mellanby read Natural Sciences and took first-class honours in both parts of the Tripos, specialising in physiology in Part II. He graduated BA in 1905.

The decisive influence of his Cambridge years was Frederick Gowland Hopkins, the biochemist whose feeding experiments on rats were showing that animals need small amounts of “accessory food factors” — substances later called vitamins — beyond protein, fat, carbohydrate and minerals. Hopkins would share the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work. Mellanby held a research studentship under Hopkins in 1906–07, and the idea that a disease could be caused by something missing from food, rather than by an infection or a poison, came to him from this laboratory.

A first paper on creatine

His first substantial piece of research, “Creatin and creatinin”, was published in the Journal of Physiology in 1908. Creatine is a compound stored in muscle that helps supply energy for contraction; creatinine is its breakdown product, excreted in urine. It was careful chemical physiology of the kind Hopkins taught, and it showed Mellanby could carry a long experimental study through to publication.

The connection to Hopkins mattered again a few years later. When the newly formed Medical Research Committee was looking for someone to investigate rickets in 1914, it was on Hopkins’s suggestion, according to the Royal College of Physicians’ account, that the task went to his former student.

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3. Medicine at St Thomas’s and Early Research

In 1907 Mellanby left Cambridge for St Thomas’s Hospital in London to complete his clinical training. He qualified MB (Cantab) in 1910 and took his MD (Cantab) in 1915. After qualifying he stayed on at St Thomas’s as a demonstrator in physiology — teaching medical students in the department where his brother John worked — and held a Beit memorial research fellowship, one of the fellowships that supported young medical scientists in Britain at the time.

Gut bacteria and histamine

One piece of his early research looks remarkably modern. In 1912, with the bacteriologist F. W. Twort, he published a paper in the Journal of Physiology on the presence of beta-imidazolethylamine — the substance now called histamine — in the wall of the intestine. They described a method for isolating a bacillus from the gut that converts the amino acid histidine into histamine. In other words, they showed that bacteria living in the digestive tract can manufacture a powerful biologically active compound from the food that passes through it. The same pair also reported on bacteria that destroy creatine.

These were small papers, but they show the direction of his interests: what happens to food inside the body, and how chemistry in the gut can affect health. That interest in diet as a cause of disease would run through everything he did afterwards.

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4. King’s College for Women and the Rickets Commission

In 1913 Mellanby took up a post in physiology at King’s College for Women in London, later known as Queen Elizabeth College. Sources differ on the rank: the Royal College of Physicians’ obituary calls it a professorship, while other accounts describe him as a lecturer there from 1913 to 1920.

In 1914 the Medical Research Committee — the body that became the Medical Research Council in 1920 — was set up with public money for research into disease. One of its first decisions was to commission an inquiry into rickets, and on Hopkins’s suggestion it asked Mellanby to carry it out. His feeding trials were done on dogs at field laboratories in Cambridge, while the microscopic and chemical work on the bones was done in London.

The experiments in brief

Mellanby raised young dogs on a restricted diet built largely around oatmeal porridge, and found that they developed rickets. When cod liver oil — or certain other fats, such as butter — was added to the same diet, the disease was prevented or cured. He concluded that rickets was a dietary-deficiency disease caused by the lack of a fat-soluble accessory food factor. The biographer B. J. Hawgood dates the conclusive evidence to 1918, at King’s College for Women; the main report appeared in The Lancet in 1919, and was later reprinted twice as a “nutrition classic”.

Mellanby first thought the protective factor was the fat-soluble vitamin A. Other researchers — notably Elmer McCollum’s group in the United States in 1922 — later showed that the anti-rickets factor was a separate substance, which became known as vitamin D. That is why historians write that his work led to the discovery of vitamin D rather than saying he discovered it himself. The experiments, the opposition from Glasgow physicians who blamed poor housing and lack of fresh air, and the later role of sunlight are covered in detail on Edward Mellanby and the Rickets Experiments. For the vitamin itself, see Vitamin D3: History and Discovery.

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5. Partnership with May Mellanby

In 1914, the same year he began the rickets work, Edward married May Tweedy (1882–1978), a physiologist at Bedford College in London whom he had first met at Cambridge. The marriage became one of the great scientific partnerships of British nutrition research. They had no children, and for four decades their work and their household were closely intertwined.

May Mellanby began dental research for the Medical Research Council in 1918. While Edward studied how diet shaped the bones of growing animals, she studied how diet shaped teeth — their structure during development, before and after birth, and their resistance to decay. Her work, published in four MRC Special Reports and in papers such as her 1919 “experimental study of the influence of diet on teeth formation”, favoured diets rich in vitamin D and low in cereals. The two lines of research fed each other: the finding that oatmeal and other cereals made rickets worse, which Edward later traced to phytic acid, had a direct parallel in her findings on teeth.

A nominee for the Nobel Prize

May Mellanby’s work was recognised far beyond Britain. A 2022 study of the Nobel Prize archives by Hense, Hugger and Hansson in the British Dental Journal found that she was nominated for the Nobel Prize and that the Nobel Committee judged her work “prize-worthy”, although she never received the award. She became Lady Mellanby when Edward was knighted in 1937.

Their joint science — cod liver oil and fats, the puzzle of oatmeal, phytic acid and teeth — is told on Cereals, Phytic Acid and Teeth: The Mellanbys’ Food Science. Readers interested in the dental side may also find the work of the American dentist Weston Price, a contemporary who studied diet and tooth decay in traditional peoples, a useful comparison.

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6. The Sheffield Chair of Pharmacology

In 1920 Mellanby was appointed to the chair of pharmacology at the University of Sheffield. The title is a little misleading. According to the Royal College of Physicians’ account, the post was in effect a chair of experimental medicine: alongside his laboratories he had beds at the Royal Infirmary, where clinical questions could be studied in patients, and a field laboratory for his dogs.

The Sheffield years, from 1920 to 1933, were the most productive of his scientific life. With a growing group of collaborators he worked on several fronts at once. The Royal College of Physicians lists studies of:

It was also at Sheffield, with H. N. Green, that he developed the idea of vitamin A as an “anti-infective” agent, published in the British Medical Journal in 1928. Hawgood’s biography sums up the cereal work: in Sheffield he showed that cereals in an unbalanced diet produced rickets because phytic acid reduced the availability of calcium. The vitamin A story and its later history are told on Vitamin A, Agene Flour and Edward Mellanby’s Legacy; the role of calcium in bone is covered on the site’s Calcium page.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1925, during the Sheffield years, and the Medical Research Council published his monograph Experimental Rickets in the same year.

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7. Secretary of the Medical Research Council, 1933–1949

In 1933 Sir Walter Fletcher, the first Secretary of the Medical Research Council, died, and Mellanby was chosen to succeed him. The Secretary was the Council’s chief executive: the person who decided, with the Council, which scientists and which questions would receive public money for medical research across Britain. Hawgood’s biography calls him a “medical research mandarin”, and he held the post for sixteen years, until 1949.

Leaving Sheffield for an administrative post in London did not end his own research. The Royal College of Physicians records that he kept experimenting at weekends throughout his secretaryship, and many of his papers on vitamin A, bone and nerves date from these years. The same account associates his time as Secretary with the National Institute for Medical Research’s move to new premises at Mill Hill, in north London.

Running research in wartime

Most of his secretaryship fell in the years of rearmament, war and post-war reconstruction. In 1943 he set out the Council’s approach in a published lecture, “Medical Research in Wartime”, in the British Medical Journal. The war years drew the Council into problems of nutrition, infection, injury and industrial health on a national scale.

His early training is relevant to this part of his life too. He had worked alongside physiologists and pharmacologists for decades, and the Royal Society memoir of him was written by Sir Henry Dale, the pharmacologist who shared the 1936 Nobel Prize for work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses — told on this site’s page on Otto Loewi and Henry Dale.

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8. Wartime Food Policy

When war came in 1939, Britain depended heavily on imported food, and German submarines attacked the shipping that carried it. Feeding the population under blockade became a national problem in which nutrition science suddenly mattered a great deal.

According to Hawgood’s biography in the Journal of Medical Biography, Mellanby acted during the Second World War as a scientific adviser to the War Cabinet and influenced the food policy that maintained the nutrition of the population during the shipping blockade. Two decades of his own work — on rickets and vitamin D, on cereals and calcium, on vitamin A — were directly relevant to decisions about what a rationed nation would eat.

His Croonian Lecture to the Royal Society in 1943 was on diet, and in the years after the war he turned increasingly to the question of how industrial processing changes food. In 1946 he reported that flour bleached and “improved” by the agene process, which used nitrogen trichloride, produced fits (then called “canine hysteria”) in dogs; and in 1951 he gave a lecture published as “The Chemical Manipulation of Food”. These findings belong to the last chapter of his science and are told on Vitamin A, Agene Flour and Edward Mellanby’s Legacy.

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9. Honours, Lectures and Books

Mellanby received most of the honours open to a British medical scientist of his generation. The Royal College of Physicians and other biographical sources list:

Fellowships and state honours

Medals and named lectures

Honorary degrees

DSc Sheffield (1933); LLD St Andrews, Birmingham and Durham (1938); DSc Oxford (1939); LLD Glasgow (1946); and honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (1946). The Glasgow degree carries a certain interest, since Glasgow physicians had been among the strongest critics of his dietary theory of rickets in the 1920s.

Books

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10. Character, Final Years and Death

The men who knew him wrote about him at length after his death: Sir Henry Dale in the Royal Society’s biographical memoir, and the nutrition scientist B. S. Platt in an obituary in Nature and a long memoir in the Annual Review of Biochemistry subtitled “the man, research worker, and statesman”. The Royal College of Physicians’ obituary, written in 1968, describes him as blunt and forthright, a man who “did not suffer fools gladly”, but also as happy and encouraging to those who worked with him. These are his colleagues’ judgements, recorded here as theirs.

He did not retire from science when he left the Medical Research Council in 1949. In his last years he continued experimental work, including tissue-culture studies with the biologist Honor Fell on the effect of excess vitamin A on developing bone, and follow-up work on the toxic substance formed in agene-treated flour. A paper of his on the effects of methionine sulphoximine on the developing chick and on transplantable tumours was published in 1956, after his death.

Edward Mellanby died suddenly on 30 January 1955, at the age of seventy. The Royal College of Physicians records that he was still doing research on the day he died. May Mellanby outlived him by twenty-three years, dying in 1978.

How he is remembered

His reputation rests on two achievements of different kinds: the experimental demonstration that rickets is a disease of diet, which helped make cod liver oil and, later, vitamin D the standard means of preventing it; and sixteen years steering British medical research through depression, war and recovery. The Royal College of Physicians’ obituary credits his work with leading to the rational treatment of rickets in infants and its near-elimination in Britain within a few years — though later historians such as Rajakumar and DeLuca describe that outcome as the joint result of the dietary and the sunlight discoveries of 1919–1924. For the foods at the centre of his story, see Cod Liver and Cod: Vitamin D and Liver Oil.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Hawgood BJ. Sir Edward Mellanby (1884-1955) GBE KCB FRCP FRS: nutrition scientist and medical research mandarin. J Med Biogr. 2010;18(3):150-7. PubMed PMID: 20798415
  2. Platt BS. Sir Edward Mellanby, 1884-1955: the man, research worker, and statesman. Annu Rev Biochem. 1956;25:1-28. PubMed PMID: 13363303
  3. Platt BS. Sir Edward Mellanby, G.B.E., K.C.B., F.R.S. Nature. 1955;175(4456):530-2. PubMed PMID: 14370159
  4. Dale HH. Edward Mellanby, 1884-1955. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 1955;1:192-222. DOI: 10.1098/rsbm.1955.0015
  5. Mellanby E. Creatin and creatinin. J Physiol. 1908;36(6):447-87. PubMed PMID: 16992892
  6. Mellanby E, Twort FW. On the presence of beta-imidazolethylamine in the intestinal wall; with a method of isolating a bacillus from the alimentary canal which converts histidine into this substance. J Physiol. 1912;45(1-2):53-60. PubMed PMID: 16993181
  7. Mellanby E. An experimental investigation on rickets. The Lancet. 1919;193:407-412. DOI: 10.1016/s0140-6736(01)25465-8
  8. Mellanby M. An Experimental Study of the Influence of Diet on Teeth Formation. Dent Regist. 1919;73(5):231-242. PubMed PMID: 33703420
  9. Hense L, Hugger A, Hansson N. Excellence in dental research: nominated scholars for the Nobel Prize 1901-1950 with a focus on Lady May Mellanby (1882-1978) and Walter Hess (1885-1980). Br Dent J. 2022;232(11):825-829. PubMed PMID: 35689067
  10. Green HN, Mellanby E. Vitamin A as an anti-infective agent. Br Med J. 1928;2(3537):691-6. PubMed PMID: 20774205
  11. Harrison DC, Mellanby E. Phytic acid and the rickets-producing action of cereals. Biochem J. 1939;33(10):1660-1680.1. PubMed PMID: 16747083
  12. Mellanby E. The Fat-Soluble Vitamins—Their Significance in Nutrition. Edinb Med J. 1933;40(4):197-222. PubMed PMID: 29646712
  13. Mellanby E. Medical Research in Wartime. Br Med J. 1943;2(4315):351-6. PubMed PMID: 20785032
  14. Mellanby E. The chemical manipulation of food. Br Med J. 1951;2(4736):863-9. PubMed PMID: 14869746
  15. Rajakumar K. Vitamin D, cod-liver oil, sunlight, and rickets: a historical perspective. Pediatrics. 2003;112(2):e132-5. PubMed PMID: 12897318

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. Edward Mellanby’s papers on rickets
  2. Mellanby and the Medical Research Council
  3. May Mellanby: diet and teeth
  4. History of rickets and cod liver oil

Further Reading

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Connections

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