Isabella Leitch's contributions to the development of systematic reviews of research evidence

Isabella Leitch was born in 1890 in the Aberdeenshire fishing town of Peterhead; her father was the local postmaster. The family must have been reasonably well-off because Isabella and her three sisters were all well-educated at a time when relatively few women reached university. Partly because she had seen Peterhead children having to go barefoot in winter, she grew up with a passionate hostility to social inequality and was an active suffragette. She was apparently sufficiently similar in appearance to Christabel Pankhurst to take her place as a decoy on the stage of the Albert Hall, allowing Miss Pankhurst to escape a riotous situation through a back door. Following her graduation in science from Aberdeen University, Isabella Leitch spent time during World War I studying a variety of haemoglobins in Copenhagen with Professor A Krogh, and it was during that time that her lifelong interest in genetics began. She was even interested in aircraft design, and I remember seeing a collection of slides illustrating various aircraft which she had used for lectures at about that time. Despite being an experienced research worker with a Doctorate of Science awarded by Aberdeen University in 1919, Isabella Leitch was unable to find a research post in Aberdeen. In 1923, however, she found a job as a temporary librarian at the Rowett Research Institute, and this was to provide the foundation for her encyclopaedic knowledge of the field of nutrition, which, in turn, led to her appointment as personal assistant to the director of the Rowett Research Institute, John Boyd Orr. She told me that, when she began working with him, his Calvinist upbringing had led him to believe that the poor were poor because they deserved to be. She changed his mind, and it was her influence that led to Orr’s landmark book Food, Health and Income, and from that, his founding directorship of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.