Women's Christian College,
Cathedral P.O., Madras, India,
January 23rd, 1930.Dear Miss Turner,
This may reach you in time to bring you my love and best wishes for your birthday. A letter from D. Elizabeth this week said you were in bed with a horrid cold. I do hope it didn't spoil your Christmas.
The Vital Capacity book came a good bit before Christmas and you can bet it has been a god-send in my preparation for this vital capacity lecture tomorrow. Thank you, Miss Turner, ever so much. Madeleine Field sent me the new edition of Dr. Cannon's book which tickled me much, too.
It has been fun preparing the vital capacity lecture and I am taking the occasion to get the vital capacities of the whole college. I want to do a lot more mathematics before tomorrow (I wish I knew more about coefficients of correlation, etc!) but this much I know, that the average of 78 girls measured so far, V.C. / height = 14.46, a little bit higher than Foster and Hsien's 14.0. They range from about 11.0 to 19.0 with an extreme at either end of 8 & 22. I am making a big copy of your chart & putting my points onto it to show tomorrow and they certainly do pepper the lower third of the chart. When I get a big pile of data then I may begin to think about new standards.
I'm getting a bit (but just a bit) alarmed about the possibility of others in India getting ahead of me if I wait till my furlough to publish. There is a man in Bombay, Bhatia who published in the Indian Medical Gazette last Sept. a very decent paper on the vital capacity of 100 Indian men; they were a little lower than the Chinese men. That man Mukherjee in Calcutta who published a "preliminary note" on the metabolism of Bengalis (he reported only 11 men & gave no details whatever) in 1926 has been asleep ever since; I wrote to him for details before Christmas & had a good reply today. He may wake up & get busy now!
Dr. Benedict is hard at work on my data as you know, I think, preparatory to publication. I do feel torn hither & yon; wanting to publish soon for his sake & for the sake of being first in the field but wanting to wait for the sake of my thesis! When Dr. Benedict wrote & suggested that I write the discussion on vital capacity for the paper I took the occasion to write to both him & Dr. Redfield (who had sent me a nice letter for Christmas) hoping that we may come to some definite understanding. If Harvard cannot allow anything in the thesis that has been previously published then I think I must hold back the vital capacity data. That is our own apparatus & I do not owe it to Dr. B. to include it in our paper. On the other hand he has been such a brick in helping me that I should like to make our joint paper as valuable as possible. If only I could go over for a week & talk to all three of you!
The circulatory tests are being dreadfully held up as urgent matters regarding metabolism have arisen. They have discovered at the Nutrition Lab that the standard for girls under 21 are far from satisfactory & as 2/3 of my subjects were in that range I'm now after a batch of older ones. Also we're now going to get urine nitrogens on some of the very low people. We haven't any Kjeldhal (!) outfit so two of the Indian chemists from the Men's Christian College are going to do them for me. Also a Canadian doctor from Vellore is coming for a week-end soon to do blood counts & hemoglobin on as many of my metabolism subjects as possible. It would be glorious to have a holiday from teaching for awhile just now! But no chance. On the contrary my little assistant has been away for a fortnight because of her mother's death & I've had both our work.
I haven't been able to get a single paper on the Schneider test. I've tried our Medical College Library & 3 American hospitals but no luck. I did want to see the original papers before my 2nd lecture next week on circ tests; also I wanted Wigger's book - but no luck.
I'll be taking your name much in both lectures!
Now I must run for I have to umpire a big intercollegiate match in teniquoit (?) (deck tennis) at 5 o'clock.
I wish we had a doctor who would cooperate in my work. Right now I've a girl with metabolism miles above everybody, even the Europeans, & I feel sure something must be wrong; but Dr. M. will only laugh at it if I say anything. She hasn't even been to see my apparatus in all this time - and she knows nothing about metabolism. We nearly had a scene at a dinner party one night when in reply to her remark I said that it made no difference to the O2 consumption of normals whether they breathed pure O2 or ordinary air, & she shot back across the table "It makes a very pretty story!" Miss McDougall tactfully changed the subject!
Much love to you, Miss Turner, and thank you, too, for the sweet Christmas card.