Charles Enrique Dent, CBE, FRCP, FRS (25 August 1911 – 19 September 1976) was a British professor of human metabolism at University College, London.
The following year, he was sent by the Medical Research Council to the recently liberated concentration camp at Belsen together with Janet Vaughan and Rosalind Pitt-Rivers, to study if starvation could be treated with protein hydrolysates.
When World War II broke out in 1939, he was sent to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, attached to intelligence and in charge of a small mobile laboratory and an assistant to look for secret writing in Army mail.
[1] In April 1945 he was sent by the Medical Research Council to the recently liberated concentration camp at Belsen together with Janet Vaughan and Rosalind Pitt-Rivers, to study if starvation could be treated with protein hydrolysates (i.e. amino-acid mixtures).
He was a pioneer in the field of partition chromatography for the study of biological fluids and developed methods of random testing for metabolic disorders.
[3] In 1949 he awarded MD and in 1951 persuaded University College Hospital to establish a metabolic ward with beds, laboratories and outpatient clinics.
Dent was a believing Catholic who applied Church teaching to his clinical work and saw no conflict between science and religion.