Waterlow, John Conrad (1916-2010)

The following is an interim description which may change when detailed cataloguing takes place in future:

Please note that this archive contains a small amount of data that is highly sensitive in nature. When the archive is catalogued, this will require closure. The archive contains:

Papers of the Tropical Medicine Research Unit, University of the West Indies, 1950s-1990s.

Papers of the Commonwealth Caribbean Medical Research Council, 1970s-1990s.

Papers of the Caribbean Health Research Council, 1980s-1990s.

Papers relating to the International Dietary Energy Consultative Group (IDECG).

Rowett Research Institute, Aberdeen: governing body minutes.

Army Personnel Research Establishment reports, including material on evaluating performance under stress, heat, cold, and sleeplessness.

Reports for various bodies including the World Health Organisation (WHO), Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), and the Tropical Medicine Research Board (TMRB).

Correspondence with various individuals and organisations, including the Wellcome Trust, Sir Harold Himsworth and Alan Jackson, Director of the Tropical Medicine Research Unit, 1950-1980s.

Programmes and information about conferences and meetings attended by Waterlow.

Research notebooks and data

Photographs.

1950-1990s

Uncatalogued: 15 archive boxes and 2 transfer boxes

John Conrad Waterlow was born in London in 1916, and educated at Eton, where a talk on leprosy in West Africa inspired him to pursue a career in medicine. He obtained a first class degree in physiology from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1939, before qualifying in medicine at the London Hospital in 1942. During the Second World War, Waterlow worked for the army, researching heat stroke in Basra.

At the end of the war, Waterlow was invited to join the new Medical Research Council Nutrition Research Unit by B. S. Platt, who told him "nutrition will be the problem of the future". In 1945 he was sent to the West Indies to find out why so many infants and young children were dying. He identified the protein deficiency disease Kwashiorkor as being responsible. Waterlow and his family spent the next ten years travelling throughout the Caribbean and Africa developing his interest in child nutrition.

In 1954 John Waterlow persuaded the Medical Research Council to found a Tropical Medicine Research Unit (TMRU) in Jamaica. He served as Director of the Unit from 1954-1970, when he returned to Britain to succeed his former mentor Platt as Professor of Human Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He retired from the LSHTM in 1982, the same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Retirement did not slow John Waterlow down. As well as continuing to publish regularly, he served as President of the UK Nutrition Society from 1983-1986, Secretary to the Caribbean Health Research Council, and chaired the Army Personnel Research Committee. He died in October 2010.

At Wellcome Collection:

WTI/TMR, papers of the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit, University of the West Indies, 1950s-1980s

Copyright assigned to the Wellcome Trust

This collection is currently uncatalogued and cannot be ordered online. Requests to view uncatalogued material are considered on a case by case basis. Please contact collections@wellcomecollection.org for more details.

An initial accession of material was given to the Wellcome Tropical Institute by John Waterlow, c.1988 and transferred to the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre when the WTI closed, 1990. Subsequent accessions were presented to the Wellcome Library by him between 2007 and 2010.