Amelia Nathan Hill

Amelia Rosina Nathan, campaigner: born Rome 30 August 1919; married first Delfo Faroni (one daughter; marriage dissolved), second 1972 Roland Hill; died Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey 27 September 2001.

Amelia Nathan Hill, founder of the charity "Action Against Allergy", fought most of her life to help others to face the kind of ills she had endured herself due to multiple food and environmental effects.

Long before these were taken seriously by the medical profession, she acted as a one-woman pressure group to convince whom she could by writing and lecturing. She impressed doctors and inspired some desperate fellow sufferers with her own indomitable courage and resolve. Her message, above all, was not to swallow the notion of the age that illnesses like her own were "all in the mind" and the products of people's imaginings.

Having been chronically ill – with migraine, stomach upsets, painful limbs and joints, so sick sometimes that she was bedridden for long periods – and having travelled the medical centres of the world for cures, she came across the revolutionary diet programme carried out by Dr Richard Mackarness at his allergy clinic in Surrey and later in Australia, where he died in 1996. Amelia Hill became his chief disciple and propagator of the elimination diet.

With Mackarness she insisted on its principle, which, when correctly carried out, helped allergics identify which foods they could tolerate and which they must always avoid. Although she was much restricted, her general health improved to a level of near normality she had not enjoyed for many years. In 1978 she founded "Action against Allergy", branch organisations of which developed in many parts of the world, not least in her own native Italy.

Although she was brought up in England and quite bilingual, able indeed to express herself with rare simplicity and fluency, the undiminished Italian part of her life was no less of an adventure story and remarkable for the self-sacrifice, spiritual resolve and deep Roman Catholic religious conviction which were her main characteristics. Not an intellectual, she was providentially blessed with common sense to face her adversities.

She was born in Rome in 1919, the daughter of Giuseppe Nathan, director of the Bank of Italy in London. Her mother was Australian, née Peggy Whiting, from Melbourne. Amelia was brought to London at the age of three months, and educated at Bedford House College. At the age of 13 she returned with her family to attend an Italian secondary school, the Convitto Nazionale at Tivoli near Rome. Her grandfather Ernesto Nathan was a popular political figure of his day and Mayor of Rome in the years before the First World War. He owed his fame to being a protégé of Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Ernesto Nathan's wife, Amelia's grandmother, accompanied as secretary into his Swiss exile.

When Amelia was 17 she had to leave school because of Italian anti-Jewish racial legislation. With her mother and two sisters, they sought refuge in Australia, while her father had remained behind in Italy. When he was struck down with a severe illness, however, they made the return voyage, but while they were still on board ship war broke out. Arriving at their former home, they had their passports confiscated and were forced to go into hiding.

The family took refuge in the mountains outside Rome, Amelia making herself useful walking three miles a day to bring food and medicines to partisans and escaped Allied prisoners of war. She was also chosen to go round the Roman ghetto to help collect the eight kilograms of gold demanded by the Nazis in return for the lives of the Jewish community in Rome – which, in the end, as we know, were not spared.

While still in hiding Amelia married a young medical student; she was, however, forced to abandon her own medical studies due to her illness. In the Fifties, she settled in England and embarked on her work on behalf of allergic sufferers. She wrote a moving account of her own life and this work, Against the Unsuspected Enemy (1980).

In the foundation of "Action Against Allergy", which was subsequently registered as a national charity, she was helped by Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis, daughter of Dylan Thomas, the poet, herself an allergy sufferer. The campaign for a better public understanding of the problem of allergy and the special needs of those who suffer from it to a greater or lesser degree, has made great progress in the last decades not least to Amelia Hill's efforts. She was in the vanguard of a movement, which has since been taken up by others, individuals and voluntary organisations.

In 1972 Amelia married her second husband Roland Hill, the journalist and writer. She won numerous awards for her work, among them the Adelaide Ristori Woman of the Year Award (Rome), 1983, and the Catholic Woman of the Year (London), 1984.

Roland Hill