As a Christmas present in 1941, I^* received from my parents a copy of British Medicine¹, which cost 3s 6d. I was told it might be taken back on Boxing Day for the Yanks. A fortnight before, Hitler had declared war on the United States. Benjamin Rycroft, since November my brother's godfather², was frequently in Windy Ridge, our rented Dunmurry Lane house. Ben read my temporary Christmas present with me. He was horrified when we reached pages 42 and 43 where the discovery of vitamins A and D is ascribed solely to Gowland Hopkins and the Mellanbys¹. Ben told me that this simply was not true—a Kansan Hopkins Professor of Biochemistry had made these discoveries³–⁶. Moreover, he had been appointed to the Section on Research of the US National Conference on Nutrition in Defense, which advised the lend-lease program⁷. “He was not mean like Sir Edward Mellanby⁸ who controlled lots of money and would not give any away, not even to make the penicillin which had run out for your pneumonia”⁹.

My father, Angus, was confronted by Ben in my presence. Ben said the book was “ill-informed and provocative”. “Maybe”, said my father, but it should go back to Musgrave Park to show the Harvard doctors that they must educate and treat with tact those divided by a common language¹⁰.

The book was repossessed and was replaced with a crash helmet. Hugh Cairns was insisting that every military motor-bike rider wear one¹¹. I was not allowed to drive my pony and trap unless I was wearing the helmet firmly strapped up.

In March 1942, Ted Badger (Fig. 1) arrived from Harvard to be chief of Medicine at Musgrave Park for Harvard's Fifth General Hospital¹⁰. He read British Medicine which was now in “Hut 1” (Officers), Musgrave Park, Belfast. Ted had graduated from Yale. As a tuberculosis specialist and a Boston City Hospital disciple of Max Finland⁹, he knew all about Elmer McCollum, PhD, Yale, 1904 (Fig. 2), and the Hopkinses, both Johns and Gowland (Fig. 3). Moreover, he had sailed a small boat across the Atlantic and knew all about nutrition.

Then started the food wars and the intrusive behaviour of the US and UK authorities. The enforcers were chiefly US military policemen with bemused sporadic cooperation by the Garda on both sides of the Éire border²⁸. British regiments were given considerable latitude in what foods they procured within a certain supplementable budget. Food from Éire and near the border was effectively proscribed for British troops – the rationale was that the Nazis, having allegedly infiltrated Éire, would poison Ulster – preferably starting with a “soft” target. The American forces were even stricter. Wherever possible, American forces were to be given only American food²⁹,³⁰. The U-boats in 1942 prevented this, but my sister and I were fed bananas by the Harvard doctors and nurses—our first memories of a banana or a tangerine.

My father was, in spring 1942, charged as commanding officer of Musgrave Park with contravening the UK food regulations. He was sent an Official Letter of Reprimand. A court-martial was threatened. This gambit did not please the Musgrave Park physicians. Rycroft and his good friend and fellow zoo consultant, Dicky Hunter⁹ launched the Vitamin A reprisal. They tested patients and physicians for night-blindness and looked at the records of many previous tests. Not surprisingly, quite a few cases were found. It was suggested the cause was a less than optimal vitamin A intake, supposedly due to adherence to regulations.

During the years 1941–43, consumption of the United States Armed Forces C and K rations led to symptoms of vitamin deficiency⁷,²⁹. This was corrected by McCollum's appointment in 1941 to the US Committees on Nutrition in Defense and Coordination of Information on Food and Nutrition⁷. These appointments were known at Musgrave Park. My father was thus enabled to contact Whitehall and Washington that his food control discrepancies were aimed at preventing vitamin A deficiency. The jaundice epidemic in the US troops in Ulster started¹⁰. For several weeks the possibility of vitamin A deficiency exacerbating the jaundice led to my father being cleared of wrong-doing. My sister and I were, thereafter, not allowed to eat bananas in public.

When I arrived at Clare College, Cambridge for the Michaelmas Term in 1952, James Wilson Millen (Fig. 4) was assigned as my Anatomy Supervisor. We met weekly for an hour or more for three years. Millen's chief thrust was that anatomy was not useful knowledge without knowing form, function and integration in man and other animals from amoeba up the phylogenetic tree. Millen knew I had been in Belfast from 1940–42²,⁹,¹⁰. I knew he had been the other lecturer to Dicky Hunter from 1941 until he came to Clare in1948 via a short stop in Professor Sir Wilfred LeGros Clark's Oxford Department of Anatomy³³. I also knew that Dicky Hunter was a great and long-time friend of my hero Benjamin Rycroft⁹. Millen's starter reading list was Hamilton, Boyd and Mossman's Human Embryology, 2nd edition³⁴, an edition of Millen and Hunter's Belfast boss, Professor Thomas Walmsley's³⁵Elements of Anatomy³⁶ and Cunningham's Manual of Practical Anatomy, eleventh edition, revised by JC Brash³⁷; four authors of the six, Queen's Belfast or Trinity College Dublin (TCD). In October 1952, Millen said he had heard via Rycroft that his Musgrave Park boss Angus thought that surgeons' children should learn to read using Gray's Anatomy. Which edition had I learned on? The correct answer, which I had to look up back in my rooms in Clare Memorial court, was the 18^th, 1913, edited by Robert Howden, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Durham. The copy which I still have is inscribed, “Mr. Martin, not to be removed from Wards 5 and 5A”³⁸. In 1953 Millen suggested I read McCollum's Newer Knowledge of Nutrition, 1929, about the vitamin A and D discoveries⁶. Then we read JH Biggart's Pathology of the Nervous System³⁹ and the Lancet galleys of Millen's papers on Vitamin A deficiency and the production of hydrocephalus⁴⁰,⁴¹ and other neurological malformations. Millen became well-known⁴²–⁵⁰. Soon after I went down to Bart's, Millen went down the Backs as Johnian Praelector and Reader in Anatomy in the University of Cambridge³³.

When I started experimental studies, Millen's teaching on the necessity to control the milieu interieur of experimental animals was invaluable⁵¹. His teaching on the use of electron microscopy in biology aided my research colleagues when we studied the blood-brain barrier⁵²,⁵³ and the lung and haemoglobin⁵⁴–⁵⁸. Millen's monograph on the cerebrospinal fluid with his long-time collaborator David Woollam, also a great teacher, was a most useful reference⁵⁹.

I asked Dr Millen why Queen's Belfast graduates had such leading roles in Teratology, Embryology and Applied Anatomy. Millen replied Dicky Hunter and Hopkins (Fig. 5). I thought he meant Gowland, not Johns. Millen politely suggested I read Gowland Hopkins's 1929 Nobel Oration²³ as well as his now classic 1906 address to the Society of Public Analysts⁶¹, and George L Streeter's recent posthumously published Apologia pro vita mea⁶². Millen regretted he had not gone to Hopkins from Queen's like Hunter, Biggart and Boyd, but at least we were working next to the Hopkins building for Biochemistry at Cambridge. Millen also introduced me to his collaborators in Sir Joseph Barcroft's adjacent Physiology department. Millen had worked with Sir Joseph Barcroft's son Henry when they were both at Queen's. Henry got his FRS in 1953. I was also introduced to the biochemists in Francis Young's Department in the Hopkins Building.

On the 10^th April 1790, Robert Garrett sailed from Belfast on the American-owned brig, the Brothers⁶³. Born near Lisburn, County Down, on the 2^nd May, 1783, Robert was the youngest of the six children of John and Margaret MacMechen Garrett⁶⁴,⁶⁵. The family arrived in Wilmington, Delaware in May 1790. His father died on the voyage or soon after but his mother was able to buy a farm in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. As a Scottish Calvinist mother, she worked the family hard⁶⁶. At sixteen, Robert wintered with Ohio Indians. In 1801 he first visited Baltimore, Maryland. By 1814, Wallace and Garrett was prospering. He dissolved the partnership on the death of his first wife, Martha, but married in May 1817 Elizabeth Stouffer, daughter of a Baltimore merchant. By 1819 Robert Garrett and Company were doing business with the rest of the United States and the British Empire.

The family of Robert Garrett Senior rescued Johns Hopkins Medical School and enabled its Hospital to be completed after the crash of 1873 – a rail-road financial bubble from which it took the US economy a decade to recover⁶⁵. The B and O and Johns Hopkins were saved by Robert Garrett's (Fig 6) son and grand-daughter (Fig. 7) travelling to London and raising over $200 million in today's money from Barings just prior to the crash⁶⁶. That was what Winston Churchill told us on 7^th December 1951¹⁰ when we dined with him, and we Harrow Monitors discussed the American Civil War. In response to a question about his 1946 Fulton, Missouri trip on the B and O, Churchill (Fig. 8) said Harry Truman was “an astute card player who had won my money.” “Never criticize the office of the President of the United States. Remember, young men, he is Commander-in-Chief”.

The New York Times had a slightly different take on the journey. Along the main line of the B and O the route passed many Civil War sites. Churchill was known to be extremely knowledgeable⁶⁷ about this horrendous first modern war in which 630,000 were killed⁶⁸. President Truman and his military aides were taught much. After his Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College⁶⁹, Churchill took his B and O Railroad carriage back to Washington, stopping en route to visit Civil War memorials. Truman and his entourage flew back sans Winston⁶⁹ and his mother Jennie Jerome's stories of the Garrett boys: in the Athens Olympic Games of '96, Robert Garrett III was the winner of both the discus throw and the shot put. He placed second in the high jump and the long jump. For each first place medal he received an olive branch and for each second place medal a branch of laurel, along with their respective diplomata⁷⁰.

Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins in his 1929 Nobel lecture asked “Who was the ‘discoverer’ of vitamins? This question has no clear answer. So often in the development of science, a fundamental idea is foreshadowed in many quarters but has long to wait before it emerges as a basis of accepted knowledge”. He continued, “…The work and words of true pioneers lay forgotten because published when average minds were not ready to appraise them at their right value”²³.

Winston Churchill, not a Hopkins “average mind”, told us on the 7^th December 1951¹⁰ that he had in March 1946 fulfilled a boyhood ambition. He had deployed his B and O coach on the return to Washington, DC like George Brinton McClellan or Robert E Lee^*. Churchill had looked for signs of Stonewall Jackson's extensive destruction: he had been told of the Garretts' heroic reconstruction efforts and their saving endowment of the Hopkins.

In the continuing focus of interest in Vitamin A and the dramatic public health improvements with its deployment by the World Health Organization⁷¹,⁷², Johns Hopkins continues the path of Elmer V McCollum, Gowland Hopkins and JW Millen⁷³ (Fig. 9).

*General McClellan, former President of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, was a life-long close friend of the Garretts, despite being fired after the September 1862 battle at Antietam, MD⁶⁵,⁶⁶, by President Lincoln and John W Garrett. John W Garrett's son, Robert Garrett II, succeeded General Robert E Lee, on Lee's death in 1870, as President of the Valley Railroad, a B and O subsidiary. In 1863 Robert Garrett II had escaped through Union barricades to join Lee's Confederate Army of the North Potomac⁶⁵.

Thanks are due to Mr James R Garrett, President, Evergreen House Foundation, Baltimore, MD, and to the staff of the US Library of Congress, Manuscript Division for permission to examine the Robert Garrett Family Papers. Container No. 1 has two communications dated 17^th October and 8^th November 1782, written and signed by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who, on Independence Day 1828, aged 90, as the sole surviving signatory of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, laid the Cornerstone of the B & O Railroad.

The authors have no conflict of interest.