Francis Gano Benedict’s reports of visits to foreign laboratories and the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory

Resum

Between 1907 and 1932/33 Francis Gano Benedict, director of the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory, made seven extended tours of European metabolism laboratories. Benedict compiled extensive reports of these tours, which contain detailed descriptions and hundreds of photographs of the apparatus, laboratories and people that Benedict encountered. The tours took place during significant decades for physiology, covering the rise of American physiology, the effect of the First World War on European laboratories and the emergence of an international community in metabolism
studies. This essay provides an introduction to Benedict’s Reports of Visits to Foreign Laboratories and their central themes, situating them within the history of American physiology and the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory. It concludes with an assessment of these volumes as a source for the history of early twentieth-century nutrition physiology.

Key words: Francis Gano Benedict, physiology, laboratory history, Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory, metabolism research.