Sir Archibald Edward Garrod KCMG FRS[1] (25 November 1857 – 28 March 1936) was an English physician who pioneered the field of inborn errors of metabolism.

[2] Archibald was the fourth son of Sir Alfred Baring Garrod, a renowned physician who received his medical degree at the age of 23 and became a professor of medicine at University College, London by the time he was 32.

At the age of 12, he began collecting them and noted how few female butterflies were present, musing over possible inheritance patterns in mammals.

In 1885 he obtained his Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Arts from Oxford, and became a member of the Royal College of Physicians, London.

They had three sons and a daughter, Dorothy Garrod, an archaeologist who was the first woman to hold an Oxbridge chair, partly through her pioneering work on the Palaeolithic period.

It is of interest that his interest in butterflies and flowers in childhood was also related to color differences and biological variation, and it may well have helped to sharpen his perception in this regard.”[4] Garrod was a proponent of scientific research as the foundation of medical practice, and published on a variety of diseases and topics throughout his career, including An Introduction to the Use of the Laryngoscope (1886) and A Treatise on Rheumatism and Rheumatoid Arthritis (1890).

He developed an increasing interest in chemical pathology, and investigated urine chemistry as a reflection of systemic metabolism and disease.

In the 1890s he collaborated with Frederick Gowland Hopkins, a well-known and respected London physician and biochemist who studied the concept of how vitamins, then known as “accessory factors”, effect dietary health of patients.

[10] Working with William Bateson, Garrod came to understand the pattern of alkaptonuria appearance in children based on Mendelian principles.

[11] Alkaptonuria is a rare familial disease of organic acid metabolism that is best known for the darkening of urine from yellow to brown to black after it is exposed to the air.

In later life, individuals with this disease develop arthritis characterized by deposition of brown pigment in joint cartilage and connective tissue.

In 1908, the core of this work was presented as the Croonian Lectures to the Royal College of Physicians, entitled Inborn Errors of Metabolism and published the following year.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1910,[1] was appointed to the Medical Research Council, and was made an honorary member of the American Association of Physicians, and of the Ärztlicher Verein in Munich.