Thursday, November 29, 2007

Mother's milk chemistry

There is this very nice paper by Prof. Albert Ripley Leeds (prof of chemistry at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N.J. who died of gastric cancer in 1902)

He analyzed the ingredients of mother’s milk and relates that to age, nationality, hair color etc.

The style of writing is awesome.

Prof. Albert screwed things up, writes it down and publishes it. That’s something you don’t see a lot nowadays.

Apart from analyses Prof. Albert describes physical properties.

When you study mother’s milk you have to describe this property.

Can you imagine a German brunette giving a chemistry professor (probably with beard) a breast?

Maybe Prof. Albert preferred being nursed by someone else:

Here are some other details of the Polish lady.

Too bad, no exact measurements of her breasts.

Maybe Prof. Albert preferred a younger lady.

This amazing 19th century paper clearly shows how careful they were back then with collecting their data.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

19th century, 18th is the 1700s

Chemgeek said...

Published screw ups. Awesome.

Now days, you'd get a starving post doc to do the tasting.

9 kids by 33. Wow. Common for those days, sure. But, wow.

Anonymous said...

I've got the impression that prof. Albert had a whole lot of fun doing this research...how often in chemistry do you get the chance to study women with an "enormous breast development"?

Anonymous said...

ROFL - that´s hilarious

synthetic environment said...

The JACS of 1721 would be great, but indeed a mistype.

The Polish lady clearly had a big impact on Albert.

9 kids, that's quite a busy household. Chemgeek has already his hand full with 3 kids probably :-)

Wavefunction said...

That's hilarious and amazing. I love Prof. Ripley's honesty.

Anonymous said...

Oh my god. This is hilarious! I have to ask, what information did Albert acquire during his experimentations? Seems to me he was just a loopy perv! Experimental data lost.!! LOL!

Anonymous said...

Oh my god. This is hilarious! I have to ask, what information did Albert acquire during his experimentations? Seems to me he was just a loopy perv! Experimental data lost.!! LOL!

Anonymous said...

He developed a rudimentary infant formula, on which his daughters flourished. Thereby saving their mother the "indignities" of breast feeding and/ or hiring a wet nurse.
You gotta start somewhere.