Women's Christian College,
Cathedral P.O., Madras, India,
July 9, 1931.Dear Miss Turner,
I've just been reading in the Jour. of the A. M. A. which Conky's father sends me an editoral on your paper with Isabel & Haynes. And in the last Alumnae Assoc. Magazine I see that you have published more. Please, when you get back to college, may I have reprints? After an interval of a year & a half I'm picking up the circulation work again. Not that the metabolism work is finished. I must do some more sleeps, especially on Europeans, & get a crowd of European women to establish their ordinary normal basal, & there's heaps to do on the diet - i.e. on nitrogen metabolism. In Singapore I learned how to do food analyses. That month there did me more good than a year of attending a class would have done, because I wasn't scared! Ever since the year when I just scraped thru Chem I I've had an awful funk about Chem labs; the work in Singapore involed all sorts of procedures & as far as those, at least, are concerned I've acquired confidence & real interest. Here in my own lab & in Singapore I'm not scared of anyone or anything. Will the horrible inferiority complex return when I get back to Harvard, I wonder?
Anyhow, my diet work is held up until I can get apparatus for food analyses. In the experiments I did in February I simply calculated calories & protein from other folks analyses. It will be more satisfactory & also simplify a terribly involved & time & labor exacting experiment if I can do my own analyses. I paid well over Rs. 200/- for urine nitrogen analyses last year, & now I'm bankrupt, scientifically, from the Singapore expedition, but I'll be receiving a considerable sum soon for the University examining that I did in April, & that will start things up again.
Meanwhile I'll get on with circulation. I want to get quantitative data on blood pressures; also I think I'll get a group of a dozen students, 1/2 as good physical specimens as we can find in college & the other half a poor lot & make as thorough a physiological study as possible including your standing test of these individuals to find out if I can [find] any striking differences between the fit & less fit in India. You see, I haven't yet had any Indians faint on the standing test. They show up better than some of the Europeans I've done. It's all awfully interesting.
I last saw Miss Stokey on the boat from Singapore to Java. While in Singapore she received a good letter from you which she shared with me. But I don't remember when you're returning to So. Hadley. By the way, Dr. Benedict has never written a word about the total urine N's you did for us on Indians & controls. I do want to know. I'm fascinated with my hot-stuff (curries, etc.) idea but am no further on with it.
Much love to you, Miss Turner,
from Eleanor.