One of the last to give his name to an eponymous disease
In a 1951 paper in the journal Clinical Science Brian McArdle described a 30 year old man experiencing pain followed by weakness and stiffness after exercise. These symptoms had been regarded as psychological, but McArdle noted that the man's muscles were electrically silent, unlike ordinary cramp, and that his venous lactate level failed to increase after ischaemic exercise. He realised that this was the same phenomenon that occurs when muscle is poisoned by iodoacetate, a substance that blocks the breakdown of glycogen into glucose, and thus McArdle's disease, or glycogen storage disease type 5, entered the literature. 
Brian McArdle was born in Balham, the son of the Scotsman's parliamentary correspondent. He and his brother became medical students and then doctors at Guy's; Brian was known as “Black McArdle” and his neurologist brother as “Red McArdle” according to their hair colour. Brian did his house jobs at Guy's, Great Ormond Street, and the Brompton, and then spent the three years from 1936 researching in Cambridge. The outbreak of war took him to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, where he worked for the Medical Research Council. He researched seasickness—so that troops would be in top condition for D Day—by making an adult size baby bouncer in the lab, swallowing a balloon attached to a pressure gauge, and bouncing around nauseously. With the aid of army “volunteers” he found that scopolamine was an effective treatment. He also researched airsickness, and the effects of heat in the confined spaces of tanks and ships.
In 1947 his war work ended and he went back to the clinical research unit and then the chemical pathology department at Guy's, working on muscular and neuromuscular conditions. It was here that he did his work on glycogen storage disease. After his retirement in 1973 he took up painting and gardening, but in his later years developed the Parkinson's disease from which he died. He leaves a wife, Betty; and four children.
Brian McArdle, physician and neuroscientist Guy's Hospital (b 1911; q 1933; MD, FRCP, DCH), d 1 August 2002.