ABSTRACT
King’s College of Household and Social Science (KCHSS) – or, as it was renamed in 1953, Queen Elizabeth College, London – is most widely known in the historiography of nutrition in Britain as the backdrop to Edward Mellanby’s pioneering experiments on the role of vitamins in rickets, which led to the discovery of vitamin D, and for instituting the first British B.Sc. in nutrition in 1953. 1 None the less, little has been written about KCHSS and its connection with the development of nutritional science in Britain, or about its contributions to the development of dietetics education and profession- alisation. 2 KCHSS was the first to establish a college diploma in dietetics in 1933 and the first university to offer a postgraduate dietetics diploma in 1936. The B.Sc. in nutrition was only the final chapter in KCHSS’s long history of teaching applied nutrition as part of its three-year ‘household and social science’ course – an applied science discipline focusing on the domestic sphere – which began in 1908 at King’s College for Women and was established as a London B.Sc. course in 1920. In terms of the college’s original ideals, the development of dietetics as a branch of household and social science (hereafter ‘household science’) was a more positive development than the nutrition B.Sc., which soon eclipsed household science in popularity and ultimately led to its demise in 1967. This chapter documents this neglected episode in the history of nutrition in Britain, tracing the origins of the discipline of household science in the context of the Edwardian women’s movement and contemporary concern about the reform of ‘the home’ as an institution, the development of dietetics as a branch of household science in the inter-war period, and the influence of KCHSS in the early professionalisation of dietetics in Britain.
