The collection includes material on several research projects undertaken by McCance and Widdowson, 1929-1993, as well as a small amount of personalia. There are notebooks recording the first research on analysis of foodstuffs carried out in the UK, started by McCance when at the Diabetes Department of King's College Hospital, after R D Lawrence asked him to analyse cooked foods. Widdowson joined him in 1933 and together they devised the separate methods for estimating different carbohydrates (glucose, fructose, sucrose, starch and dextrose). In 1940 their findings were published as Chemical composition of foods, the first of now regularly produced Standard Food Composition publications. There are notebooks and photographs of self-experimentation undertaken within the department, on salt-deficiency, conducted by McCance on himself, colleagues and medical students, involving not only a salt-free diet, but exposure to a hot air bath to sweat the salt out of the body, and also on absorption and excretion of iron. There is also his diary of the experimental study of rationing undertaken in 1939. There are 220 complete questionnaires from their survey of female colleagues and acquaintances for a study of physical and emotional periodicity in women, undertaken 1929-1930. There are experimental notebooks and files relating to research into body composition and development from 1944 onwards. This collection represents only a part of the diversity of research undertaken during the course of their long careers.
