A Letter Written on May 19, 1924

May 19, 1924.

Dear Miss Turner, -

I certainly meant to write you before this about the interview with Dr. Benedict, but the hours and days do go by at a pace.

After accosting the wrong man, much to both of our amusements, I found Dr. Benedict. He was very pleasant indeed and seemed tremendously enthusiastic about having the metabolism business go at Holyoke next year. He spoke at some length of the great need for workers trained not only in the mechanics of making measurements but also with background enough to interpret results correctly.

I'm to go to Boston right after Commencement here - it comes on the eighteenth - and stay three weeks. He thinks I can get enough of the mechanical side and also do some hospital observation in that time. They are going willing to provide me with a subject or subjects to work on if they can. He suggested that if I had any friends in Boston who might be willing to act as subjects, they would pay them 50¢ an hour to do it. I thought of Libbie Mann - though I think she might be an irregular sort of person to work on.

Next fall, he's (Dr. Benedict) coming up to Holyoke with two sets of apparatus and stay around for several days to see that things are starting off right. Then, perhaps he'll stop off once a month or so during the year, just to check up on things.

Besides doing metabolism measurements before and after getting up and solving that problem, he wants me to take measurements of the temperature of different parts of the body with each set of metabolism measurements. They have only about six (I think it wasn't any more) measurements of this kind and he thinks it would be decidedly worthwhile to do some more. He also thinks that it would be decidedly an advantage to have some more measurements of basal metabolism of women of college age. He urged the necessity of knowing the conditions under which the girl spent the night etc. He spoke of temperature especially and I wondered if it would be worthwhile to get a couple of maximum & minimum thermometers to keep in the rooms of the subjects during the night? They use them with the rats here and of course look at it them and set it them over every day. I don't know whether that would be an unnecessarily close control or not, but I shouldn't think so.

He spoke as if there should be two girls done each morning - and it would be nice if they could be room mates. They would have to be girls without nine o'clock classes on the mornings they were done. Of course they couldn't go to chapel on those mornings. I'll also need a helper to take galvanometer readings on the body temperature business. (Dr. Benedict supplies that apparatus, also.) that's as simple as reading a volt meter or an ammeter. I have thought of some things, since he was here, which I I'd [sic] like to ask him, for instance, whether two girls could be taken on three alternate mornings and then two others on the other three mornings. - Run four girls for a month and then four different ones for the next month, so that you carried each girl through a complete menstrual cycle.

Are you going to get a line on the girls who would be willing to be subjects there this spring or wait until next fall?

Dr. Laurens has been wondering if perhaps I could do some problem with light next year. There's rather an interesting one on the effect of u.v. on wound-healing. Something has been done, but he thinks not adequately. The problem would probably be one that could be reduced more or less to a matter of routine, so that I should think that I might be able to do it. The problem would consist in inflicting wounds on rats and then exposing one group to radiation, keeping another group in the dark & perhaps another in room light and then measuring the wounds at intervals. As long as we have the iron arc and the Hg vapor lamp, we might use them on some such a problem. The chief work would consist in cleaning cages and putting in food and water and probably with the help of a renumerative for a little while a day, we could manage that. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew, but since both of these problems are rather of a routine nature and involve little fussing with methods etc., I think I might manage them. I'd like to try it any way. What do you think?

I wanted to ask, also, when do we move into the new building? If in the middle of the summer, would it be as early as the end of the my time in Boston? Of course I want to help!

I'd love to see you, Miss Turner - there are lots of things to be talked about.

It is really spring here, at last - we've waited a long time for it. Yesterday afternoon I went canoeing on the Housatonic. It turned out to be quite an adventure - a squall came up and the floods descended and the winds blew. The paddling was fairly exciting for a time. We heard after we landed that two Yale men had drowned up the river about half a mile from us. They attempted to rescue two boys whose canoe had capsized, capsizing their own boat and the two were drowned. It was probably cramps after the overheating due to the hard paddling and then falling into the cold water. They were both Juniors here.

One more thing I think of to ask about - have you any suggestions as to the best way to go about getting living quarters in Boston? I haven't an idea about a place to live there.

I hoep that everything is going well in South Hadley. Give my love to the "department."

Much love to you -
Betsy.