Commentary: Isabella Leitch (1890–1980)—a personal memoir

soon after I started work at the Rowett Research Institute in September 1937 where I had been appointed to carry out the clinical examinations of the children in the Boyd Orr survey. My colleague, the late Angus Thomson, and I frequently sought her advice, which was often blunt but always helpful. Isabella Leitch had spent the 1914–18 war carrying out research in genetics and plant physiology at Copenhagen University with Prof. A Krogh, a Nobel prize winner in medicine, and she had obtained her DSc at Aberdeen University in 1919 on the basis of published and unpublished papers. In spite of the fact that she was, by then, an experienced research worker, she was unable to find a research post in Aberdeen. At length, in 1923, she found a job as temporary librarian at the Rowett Research Institute.1 She soon found herself involved in various research programmes, first in animal nutrition and later, when the Institute became involved in human nutrition, in that area too. Her encyclopaedic knowledge and sharp critical mind made her a key figure and she became adviser and personal assistant to the director, John Boyd Orr. In the 1930s, the signs of specific nutritional diseases such as scurvy, rickets and pellagra, were well known, but there was little agreement on the early symptoms and signs of 216 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EPIDEMIOLOGY