3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 297In view of the assembly’s resolution and having considered the Burnet-
Aykroyd report, the Health Committee decided in October to establish a
Technical Commission on Nutrition composed of medical experts. This
commission first met between November 25 and 29 in London where
it drew up the following report: The Report on the Physiological Bases of
Nutrition. This report was published in Geneva on December 6.^198
As to the Mixed Committee, McDougall had suggested to League
officials not only the kind of experts that should be on the committee but
also that ‘decisions about membership should pay some regard to geo-
graphical representation; it should include “the best available men” from
the United States, the overseas dominions, France, Scandinavia, Central
Europe, the Mediterranean and South America.’^199 In the event, the
committee included experts recruited from all the countries and regions
McDougall had specified, McDougall himself being among them. Also
included on the committee at the suggestion of McDougall were rep-
resentatives of the Health Committee’s Technical Commission and the
International Labour Office.^200 A representative of the League’s Child
Welfare Committee was also appointed. Later however, following the
absorption of the Child Welfare Committee by the Advisory Committee
on Social Questions in January 1937, the representative of the former
committee was replaced by a representative of the latter.^201 The IIA
was well represented on the committee, although it is noteworthy that
its Italian representatives did not attend any of the committee’s sessions.
One of those representatives was Baron Giacomo Acerbo, a former min-
ister, dean of the Economic and Commercial Faculty at the University of
Rome and the president of the IIA. The other Italian appointed to the
committee was the IIA’s former president Giuseppe De Michelis. A sen-
ator since 1928 and a former Italian delegate to the League, De Michelis
(^198) League of Nations, League of Nations Health Organisation: Report to the Council on
the Work of the Twenty-Fifth Session of the Health Committee, 13, and ‘Physiological Bases of
Nutrition,’ The Lancet 226, no. 5860 (1935): 1434–437.
(^199) Way, A New Idea Each Day, 190.
(^200) League of Nations, Interim Report of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of
Nutrition, 9–10; League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the
League of Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy,
9–10, and Way, A New Idea Each Day, 171.
(^201) League of Nations, Nutrition: Final Report of the Mixed Committee of the League of
Nations on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy, 9–10.