Aspects of Vitamin A

Abstract

Musgrave Park Hospital in 1942 was the site of an Anglo-American Vitamin A caper. A threatened court-martial was pre-empted. Subsequently the Queen's lecturer in Anatomy, JW Millen, who was the other lecturer to the first editor of this journal, RH Hunter, did much distinguished work. The neurological effects of Vitamin A were elucidated. Further work on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), placenta, thalidomide and poliomyelitis led to the pre-eminence in applied anatomy and teratology of now Reader James Wilson Millen and Professors JD Boyd and WJ Hamilton, all Queen's Medical School graduates. Training of RH Hunter, JH Biggart and JD Boyd at Johns Hopkins University profoundly influenced these seminal discoveries. The Garretts, a family of Lisburn, County Down origin, saved Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School from financial disaster. The Garretts founded a commercial and mercantile empire that took control of the Baltimore and Ohio (B and O) Railroad and enabled the Garretts to dictate that women should be admitted to the Hopkins Medical School and Hospital on exactly the same terms as men. All women and men should already be university honours graduates. Winston S Churchill on his progress up and down the B and O main line in March 1946, recounted to President Harry S Truman and Harry Hopkins his mother's tales of the Garrett boys' adventures.