John James Rickard Macleod, the son of the Rev. Robert Macleod, was born at Cluny, near Dunkeld, Perthshire, on September 6, 1876. He received his preliminary education at Aberdeen Grammar School and in 1893 entered Marischal College, University of Aberdeen, as a medical student. After a distinguished student career he graduated M.B., Ch.B. with Honours in 1898 and was awarded the Anderson Travelling Fellowship. He proceeded to Germany and worked for a year in the Physiological Institute of the University of Leipzig. He returned to London on his appointment as a Demonstrator of Physiology at the London Hospital Medical College under Professor Leonard Hill. Two years later he was appointed to the Lectureship on Biochemistry in the same college. In 1901 he was awarded the McKinnon Research Studentship of the Royal Society. At the early age of 27 (in 1902) he was appointed Professor of Physiology at the Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, a post he occupied until 1918, when he was elected Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto. Previous to this transfer he had, during his last two years at Cleveland, been engaged in various war duties and incidentally had acted for part of the winter session of 1916 as Professor of Physiology at McGill University, Montreal. He remained at Toronto for ten years until, in 1928, he was appointed Regius Professor of Physiology in the University of Aberdeen, a post he held, in spite of steadily increasing disability, until his lamentably early death on March 16, 1935, at the age of 58.
