Esther Loring Richards, M.D.
1316 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MarylandSherborn, Mass.
9/29/24.Lady dear,
I'm glad you came & saw us, & I hope you'll come again. The notice of the Foreign News Bulletin has come to father & he is very appreciative. You know he cannot write to thank you when the original comes, so you'll understand & make allowances, for his gratitude & limitations.
It sounds as if you were launched on your year auspiciously. How slip-shod they do things at the Harvard Medical! & that nice discrimination against our sex! Pleasant isn't it. I've often longed to put a bomb under that noble University, blow it sky high, & begin again with something less conservative & aristocratic. I've just finished that book you saw me reading, Meade's Headquarters by Theodore Lyman of Boston. Lyman was a Harvard-Boston product of smug complacency who had a winter home in Brookline & a summer one at Beverly. For past time he assisted Louis Agassiz! Well he went to war in a decent way - volunteer aid to Meade. It was a safe, clean job, with no pay or chance for promotion, but what of it - his calcified conscience [?] residual was satisfied. It seems Mr. Lincoln came to camp once & Lyman describes the expression of his face as that of "plebian vulgarity." Think of that snobbish pup! That's Harvard alright. The great Edward Everett & his magnificent Gettysburg oration would never be remembered even as a footnote in history were it not for the 2 paragraphs of "plebian vulgarity" produced on the same day. Forgive this grand outburst. I am sick of academic complacency & all that goes with it.
I put the note of failure at the end of my Conservation of Social Energy on purpose to counteract the widespread optimism that every misfit & failure can be readjusted if one only has enough patience & tact. Not a bit of it. That is why I chose the topic of conserving social energy, of looking where one is going as a general prepares his field for battle. It is because we are drugged with unreasonable optimism that so many people are pawing the air & raising dust in social-economic lines today.
Friday I went over to Wellesley & lunched with Miss Moody; also attended he senior class in genetics. Very good, clear presentation I should say. I met Miss Hubbard who wanted me to talk to all the zoo classes then in the building, but I declined with haste & some grace, I hope. Miss Moody seems to have a heavy teaching schedule - introduction to zoology, comparative anatomy, heredity work, besides 3 P.Ms. a week in the phys. education building. She was made full professor last spring. In physiology they have an exchange prof. from Brown this year for the first time, a Dr. Mitchell. I was gratified to see the interest in biology apparently manifested by the girls. All the work in this subject is elective.
Well, tomorrow I set sail for J.H. on the Federal. 7.30 P.M. Today I am taking the family to Upton, Mass. to see 12 of the cattle we sold one man last December: am also trying to catch cats & kittens (10) to chloroform. The victims are not those tame things that crawled over you, but wild ones under boards etc. I may have to leave them.
I dread going back as I always do. I was born to vegetate, but after I get going I don't mind the hustle so much.
I finally accepted that invitation to speak to the headmistress' assocation of the middle west at Cleveland. Oct. 24. they wrote me again saying they would take anything I had written or published, so I saw no way out.
I shall think of you with love and every good wish for your work this year. I know you'll do it well, if not to your own satisfaction.