290 J.-A. PEMBERTON
life’ than was ‘the case with most of the League’s other technical com-
mittees’), Léon Bernard requested in the name of the French government
that nutrition be included within the committee’s programme of work.
That same year, the Health Section published a report entitled The Food
of Japan which had been prepared by Egerton Grey of the University of
Cairo in the wake of Grey’s visit to the Imperial Institute of Nutrition, a
visit that had been organised by the Health Section. In 1931, the Health
Committee organised a collective tour to study the supply of milk in the
United States. The results of this study were published in two numbers
of the Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation in 1932. In 1933,
the Quarterly Bulletin published a report on the hygiene of milk in the
Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle.^170
The main intention behind the early work undertaken by the League’s
Health Organisation concerning nutrition was to show the role of adequate
nutrition in preventative medicine. However, the onset and deepening of
the Depression saw the Health Committee expand its field of vision. At its
nineteenth session in October 1932, the Health Committee decided ‘to
undertake the study of the effects of the economic crisis on public health,
with particular reference to conditions of under-nutrition produced by the
crisis.’^171 This decision gave rise to a study on the institutional means by
which the nourishment of the poor was assured in the United Kingdom
and a study of the relation between diet and low-incomes. The Health
Committee also convened two conferences of experts in 1932, one in Rome
in September and one in Berlin in December, both of which dealt not only
with such medical questions as the principles of an adequate diet, but also
with ‘the conditions brought about by the economic crisis’.^172 The reports
of these two conferences and the two aforementioned studies were subse-
quently published in the Quarterly Bulletin.^173
(^170) Morley, The Society of Nations, 614, and League of Nations, Report on the Physiological
Bases of Nutrition, 4. See also League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation:
Report to the Council on the Work of the Twenty-Second Session of the Health Committee 7;
R. Burri, ‘The Milk Supply of North American Cities,’ Quarterly Bulletin of the Health
Organisation 1, no. 1 (1932); G. S. Wilson, ‘The System of Grading Milk in the United
States of American,’ Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation 1, no. 4 (1932); and
J. Parisot, P. Melnotte, and L. Fernier, ‘Milk Hygiene in the Department of Meurthe-et-
Moselle,’ Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation 3, no. 4 (1934).
(^171) League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, 4.
(^172) Ibid.
(^173) Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organisation 1, no. 3 (1932), and Quarterly Bulletin
of the Health Organisation 2, no. 1 (1933).