A Letter Written on Oct 3, 1911

[This letter must have been added to the envelope after Abby received the letter from Porter, since the envelope was postmarked a month earlier. It appears to be a draft of a response to the letter from Porter.]

Oct. 3, 1911

My dear Dr. Porter: -

I thank you for your continued interest in my welfare. At present I think I can capture about one day a week for going on with my work, and I shall be very glad to have your advice as to what I can best do here how to work spend it to the best advantage[.] Whatever it is work I do, I must plan to do it quite unassisted here as laboratory help for my personal work is not available. The companion I at one time hoped to have has cheerfully married a Hopkins physiologist and her successor is rightly zoological rather than physiological in her training.

The topic you suggested seems to me interesting - if tonic contractions that come and go on demand can be secured. The Storey contractions seem to demand machinery require apparatus which I can't very well get here, but there may be are doubtless other modes of attack. In The haze in my mind is dense when I try to distinguish in smooth muscle the distinctions between twitches and sustained contractions composed of them on the one hand and tonus which certainly looks different in some ways whose nature is? on the other hand, is horribly lazy in The anatomical relations are so much less clear cut but I should be delighted to clear up this haze of mine in some say. Will you tell me more of your thought for this work? I can shall then tell know better then whether it will be possible here now this year.

As I have meditated this summer about the electric variation of muscle it has seemed to me that I am I have felt unwilling to consider any work in that line as complete which does not include results gotten with the string galvanometer, and See above. At present I can't be content to work with that instrument with no higher court of appeal than exists in this country. Such chances as I have had to know of the work with that beast the galvanometer have made me respect it the creature vastly, and feel that while its merit is powers are great, knowledge of its true inwardness is not to be attained lightly. It may be like a Singer Sewing Machine - "Even a child can run it" - but I can't feel that its delicate subtle disposition is thus appreciated used to advantage. I may be able to do somewhat make progress with the capillary electrometer here, but it will take some time to get ready to do things, and I shall have to work at night as the college dynamo runs only after dark, and our building is not wired from the town circuit current. I am anxious to do what I can.

As I have understood the degree requirements, the examination I took in 1910 disposed of the subordinate subjects, zoology and Comp. Anat. and of the preliminary general survey of physiology. I shall be glad to know more definitely about other requirements than the thesis and its outlying physiological territory. I wish to keep my work in line albeit I am at present very uncertain about the next few years because of and to finish the degree requirements if I can though my mother's feeble health makes me very uncertain how much I can do, and when, and where.

The year here begins very happily, even and very busily. I am so far out of the grooves that I have forgotten two tea-parties already - and rejoiced that I did! am now I am hoping wishing that such honest lapses of memory may might continue. The country is beautiful, and seems more fair because of the city years, I am sure. I'm glad there is no drought to make us pity the growing things instead of rejoicing in their with them.

I hope your summer was altogether a happy, invigorating one play time and that all went well in Dover, and at the Med. Sch. during your absence. About the records I left for you I've no ideas whatever. It was so hot during early July that I couldn't think - and I don't know how at all what I did. Please let me fill in gaps this fall as far as I may. With my best wishes for the fall work, believe me, I hope the work in the laboratory this fall will be the most successful.

Sincerely yours,
Abby H. Turner