An American Physiologist Abroad - continued...

3. The Foreign Laboratory Visits

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1907 - 1910 - 1913 - 1923 - 1926 - 1929 - 1932/33 | Slideshow: start

On his first tour Benedict visited the largest and most well-known laboratories for metabolism research, especially in Germany. Many directors of Central European labs had trained with Carl Ludwig.

Benedict belonged to the generation of American scientists who had received laboratory training in Germany. As Atwater’s assistant in Wesleyan and Storrs, he had also learned to appreciate international communication and exchange. Already during negotiations for his directorship of the Nutrition Laboratory he recommended that it approve funds for his international travel. By the end of his tenure as director of the Nutrition Laboratory in 1937, Benedict taken seven tours of Europe, each lasting about four months and including dozens of laboratories involved in metabolism and other physiological researches. The reports of these visits offer a written and photographic panorama of European physiology laboratories and record the changing constellations of laboratory dominance both within Europe and internationally from 1907 to 1933. Benedict writes as a participant and an observer, as an anthropologist analysing European academic cultures and as a strategist, whose career, prestige and research are intertwined with a private funding organisation and its ambitions.