Arnold Peter Meiklejohn

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.

[2] For three years he worked with leading American physicians who included George Minot and William Bosworth Castle,[1] and from 1939 to 1941 published papers in The New England Journal of Medicine on human nutritional deficiencies,[2] writing often on errors of metabolism.

[2] He returned to live in England, and the 1942 edition of The Medical Directory gives his address as 15, Ox Lane, Harpenden, Hertfordshire.

[2] During the Second World War, Meiklejohn became nutrition adviser to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).

[3][4] 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.

They included Michael Hargrave, whose diary, later published as Bergen-Belsen 1945: A Medical Student's Journal, details his month-long experience at the camp[3][10][11] and describes the introductory briefing on the challenges they would face, given by Meiklejohn.

[1] Also in 1946, following a severe winter and restricted imports, leading to German demands for more food, the British Medical Research Council sponsored a number of nutritional scientists including Robert McCance, Elsie Widdowson, and Meiklejohn to report on the German state of health.

All three came to the same conclusion that the Germans might have lost some weight due to food shortages but were generally not malnourished, and after examining more than 2000 Germans, Meiklejohn reported that "many adults are likely to have benefitted from losing excess weight and its complications of high blood pressure, diabetes and gall stones".

[21] 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.

[1] 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.