[some paragraph marks added for ease of reading]Srinagar, Kashmir,
June 14, 1930.Dear Miss Turner,
So very much to write, of work and of holiday. Your good letter (you do write such good letters) of May 2nd, found me in camp last week, and I don't think I had answered your last one of Jan. 31st. You are so awfully busy; I appreciate very much the letters you send me.
Also all the work you are doing in the cause of oriental physiology. I'm sorry Dr. Benedict has bothered you with that, though I am very much wanting to know the outcome. I hope Mary Clayton may have done the urines for you but I'm afraid you'll have done the metabolisms unassisted. It is awfully kind of you to do it.
Last term I got 8 Indians & 4 Europeans whose metabolic levels I knew to give me 72 hour urines in the first case and 24 hr. in the second. A careful chemist at the Men's Christian College did the analyses for me since we have no [...] outfit. The results were extraordinary. Total N2/24 hrs. range = 2.43 to 6.56 gr. The Indian range was 0.061 (Metab. -23.0) to .158 gr. N2/kg/24 hours. (-20.3% metab.) The higest one is a member of staff who takes mostly European food; the highest on Indian diet (Metab. -26.5, H-B. unmodified) was 0.094. Some of the high metabs are included. European range was 0.115 (Miss Stokey) to 0.184 (me) gr./kg/24 hours. (range total per 24 hrs. = 6.09 to 9.367 gr.) I take extra eggs and milk which would account for my .04 gr/kg. more than any of the others. The total volumes of both races were amazing. Miss Stokey had only 540 cc/24 hours, and the high nitrogen Indian (she, by the way, will be at Vassar next year) only 1745 cc/72 hours!! That in a humid atmosphere, too.
Now, the question is, to what extent may the low protein diet be responsible for the low metabolism? I can find awfully little literature on the subject. Dr. Du Bois sent me what reprints he had but I'm afraid they have been lost because his letter came a good while ago & there are no reprints yet. I had hoped his experiments with the arctic explorers on pure meat diet might help me, but he writes that the meat was mostly fat and that it didn't affect the metab. I'm hoping Dr. Benedict may send me something.
It is my strong feeling (but needs accurate verification) based on the class studies we have done that our students have enough in the way of calories. I don't know about vitamins but will try to determine that (it can be only very roughly) at once. If vitamins are all right I should like to take a squad of perhaps a dozen students distributed over the metabolism range, study their ordinary diet and urine output for a week, and then put them on a diet which will only be changed to include enough protein to bring the urine nitrogen up to the European level. What I have no idea about is, how long a time may be necessary for diet to affect the basal metabolic level, if it does affect it. I can't ask the girls to go on forever on a special diet. (People are so fussy about their food in this country.)
It is very sad that the man who could help me most in the planning of the diet will be on leave in England & the U.S.A. until Christmas time. That is Dr. J. L. Rosedale, Prof. of Biochem. in the Medical College in Singapore. When Dr. Cook, Director of the London School of Tropical Medicine, visited us, he advised me to get in touch with him & I have been very thankful. He's a first-class biochemist, has published a good bit with Plimmer and independently; is doing a lot of chemical analysis of Indian foods & is really keen on research. He has written very friendly & stimulating letters and seems to be pleased himself to have found another one interested and working. He suggests a certain fish meal that they prepare and whose proteins they know from analysis. I wish he hadn't gone away. He will be at Harvard part of the summer, with Folin, with whom he has worked before.
Then there's the humidity question. There must be something besides diet that causes the European drop. (By the way, can you put me onto any literature about urine analyses of women in the west, for comparison? I can find no reference to any sex differences other than creatin or creatinine (I forget which, and I should like to know about total nitrogens & total volumes.) A man in Lucknow has just presented a thesis on "Basal Metabolism" for the M.D. degree there, in which he thinks he has demonstrated that humidity causes a drop in the metabolism. I have the manuscript copy here now and there are many points in the paper that are not clear or that seem definitely questionable. The most serious is that he discarded the noseclip as "inefficient" and had an assistant hold the nose. The minute readings of Oxygen consumption vary on one of the two sample experiements he gives, from 20 to 420 cc, a variation which seems to me most unlikely. Even if his technique is all right, the data do not seem to me convincing that there is any relationship between metab. and humidity. Dr. Burridge, the prof. (Anglo-Indian, I think) of Physiology at Lucknow under whose direction Banerje did his work, is in Kashmir and I have been expecting to see him here this morning but he hasn't turned up. I can't see how he can have let such a sloppy piece of work go through, if he's any good himself.
You may judge that most of my time has gone into metabolism. It does seem most important at present to try to run the thing down to its causes while I'm about it. But when I was working up those two University lectures in January I got all excited again about vital capacities and circulation. The first I can surely get. I have about 150 now and hope to get at least 500 before I come home. They are shockingly low. I'm thinking of giving a short paper at Christmas time at either the Indian Science Congress in Nagpur or the meetings of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine in Bangkok on vital capacities. There will not be enough data by then for real statistical treament nor do I know enough about statistics to do that, but I think the paper should have some value to any Eastern audience. I hope it will be Bangkok becuase then I may meet people from China & Japan, & Dr. Rosedale will be back by then & has invited me to stop at Singapore before or after. Wouldn't it be fun?
The summaries of the two lectures are to be published in the Madras Univ. Journal and I believe they will provide reprints. They are almost entirely a survey of your work on vital capacity and circulation. At the lectures I had charts and tables of both your work and mine referring also to other work on Indians & on the Chinese but they are not given in the summary and I have given no detailed data of my work there thinking I should reserve it for a proper paper.
You see, Dr. Redfield has encouraged my publishing on my own before I come home. There has been a good deal of correspondence on the question of the Harvard thesis and the Nutrition Lab in the last few months & both Harvard and Dr. Benedict have been awfully decent. Dr. Redfield brought up my case at a meeting of the Committee on Higher Degrees and they voted approval of my plan. They understand that the metabolism work will be published jointly (altho' Dr. Benedict, so Dr. R. wrote, offered to withdraw himself and the Carnegie Inst. from the picture) and that my thesis will include other work in addtion to the metabolism. Dr. Redfield wrote very encouragingly and Dr. B. seems to be quite satisfied with the arrangement. I am working "nominally" under the direction of Dr. Redfield, in the eyes of Harvard.
It remains to be seen how much "other work" can be done in the remaining three years. This next year looks pretty full of metabolism. Vital capacities take much less time and can be squeezed in, I am sure, and, I think, ordinary reclining blood pressures. But whether I'll get very far with the problem of circulation this term I don't know. It's maddening to leave it because it is so interesting. We'll see.
I hope you are really glad about Copenhagen. Sometime perhaps you'll write what it is you are going to do, and what Krogh is doing now. Do he and Dr. Benedict get on well? I have sometimes thought of wirting to Dr. Krogh to ask him for reprints of the metabolism work and just to get into touch with him but I haven't, not being sure the the relationship might be. Mrs. Krogh does metabolisms, too, doesn't she?
I do hope you may meet Dr. Larsen's eldest daughter whose husband is Director of a large t.b. satatorium in Vjelefjord. They were in India for a year or two in the big t.b. san. that I sometimes visit. I haven't met her but feel as though I had. All my three sets of Danish friends will be in India the whole year. The son of the Frimodt Möllers whom I visited in Copenhagen is just now taking his final medical exams there and will come out in Sept. for a year to work with his father in the United Mission T.B. Sanatorium in So. India.
How I wish you would go back via India and China! Is there any chance at all? It would be so very nice to see you.
Kashmir has been simply glorious. Some of the letters that I have sent home I have asked to have circulated to you and D. Elizabeth and the Brookline folks and some others. I hope they will get ot you before you leave. There has been so much to write that it seemed to take all the time to put it into the home letters. We are all awfully fit after a month's camping and tramping in glorious mountains. Oh, I wish you could come, and that Miss Smith might have seen it, too.
Edith & I planned to leave tomorrow, but the motor agent reported yesterday that a "mountain" had fallen over the road in a storm and we await news that we can go through. So far there has been no interference with the railway. But the political situation gets more and more saddening. There is so much mistrust on both sides. The Viceroy seems to me splendid but he has a dreadfully difficult task.
I hope it will be a good year, Miss Turner. With very much love to you,
from Eleanor