The Unconventional Career of Muriel Bell by Diana Brown

Author:Diana Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Otago University Press
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Heading to Harvard

Muriel returned to Fiji at the request of the Medical Department two years later, on her way to spend part of her sabbatical year at Harvard University. Her sabbatical had been long deferred because of postwar stringency, and she was looking forward to investigating a number of nutritional subfields simultaneously at a world-class research institution. Muriel left New Zealand in late June 1952. Alf did not join her, preferring to backpack independently through Europe, and although they were in contact during their travels, they did not meet. Muriel headed via Fiji and India to Europe, where she attended the International Dietetic Congress in Amsterdam – the first of many meetings with nutritional scientists from all over the world.

In Britain Muriel visited a number of laboratories doing nutritional studies to learn about new equipment and techniques, ‘particularly with reference to tropical foods, chromatography, studies on vitamin D, techniques of vitamin assay’.23 In the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and on both coasts of the United States, she visited laboratories involved with processing and distributing liquid milk. In this capacity she represented the Central Milk Council (soon to become the New Zealand Milk Board), which had provided her with a £200 travel subsidy. Muriel was impressed with the number of completely covered delivery vans, which made her feel ‘somewhat ashamed of this particular aspect of the New Zealand Town Milk Industry’.24 The council had also asked Muriel to enquire after the manufacture of yoghurt and whether it was possible to obtain a yoghurt culture.25

After spending the rest of the Northern Hemisphere summer in Britain, Muriel spent the remainder of the year in the United States. Her main objective was to sound out opinions on the recommended allowances of specific nutrients advocated by the Food and Nutrition Board of the US National Research Council: ‘It is important that we should have some idea of the underlying currents of thought that have influenced the past decisions and of the changes that are taking place in the viewpoints held, for the Recommended Allowances have had a far-reaching influence on all phases of nutrition work throughout the world.’26

Beginning in September 1952, Muriel spent six months at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston as a research fellow in nutrition. This position allowed her to undertake laboratory work and to attend lectures given by the head of the department, Frederick J. Stare. She recounted Dr Stare’s ‘thought-provoking’ opening lecture, in which he pointed to the rapid changes in public health in the first half of the twentieth century: ‘The student of public health must realise that the diseases of which people die today are not typhoid, pneumonia, scarlet fever, diphtheria or even tuberculosis, but atherosclerosis.’27 With rapid advancements in treatments with antibiotic drugs and immunisation, degenerative diseases had supplanted infectious diseases as the primary concern in public health research. Stare’s first series of lectures covered such topics as recent dietary surveys, nutritional education, the effect of climate on nutrition, and means of improving the world’s food supply.

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