HISTORY AND PLAN OF RESEARCH. 



Aside from several preliminary observations at the Nutrition 

 Laboratory, in which only the carbon-dioxide output of infants was 

 determined, the first studies made in this series on the gaseous meta- 

 bolism of young children were carried out at the Massachusetts 

 General Hospital. A respiration laboratory was established in that 

 institution in January 1913, and observations by a member of the 

 Nutrition Laboratory staff were made almost daily, except during the 

 summer months, until June 1915. The infants first used were mostly 

 from the Out-Patient Department, but it soon became evident that 

 data regarding the normal metabolism of young children could not be 

 obtained with these infants, for normal, healthy children are not to 

 be found in a hospital. These earlier observations therefore included 

 a considerable number of underweight children and a few abnormal 

 cases. The results of the studies, which comprised data for children 

 under two years of age, have been reported in detail in a monograph 

 and elsewhere. 1 The later observations at the Massachusetts General 

 Hospital were made with new-born infants from the Boston Lying-in 

 Hospital, their age varying from 43 minutes to 8 days. The data 

 for 105 new-born infants have been reported in a monograph and in 

 several journal articles. 2 



Subsequently the apparatus at the Massachusetts General Hospital 

 was removed to the Directory for Wet-Nurses of the Boston Infants' 

 Hospital, and studies of children, varying in age from two weeks to 

 two years, were carried out. Conditions here were especially favor- 

 able for the collection of normal data, as the children, mostly breast- 

 fed, were the offspring of resident normal wet-nurses, and thus repre- 

 sented an unusually good type of physical normality. Furthermore, 

 the mothers were somewhat under control. As the inmates of this 

 institution constitute a more or less floating population, a large number 

 of babies were available for observation. It was also possible to follow 

 the life-history of a number of the infants and make observations of 

 their metabolism from time to time over a period of several years. 

 Some of the children in these prolonged studies had been previously 

 observed in the study of new-born infants. To obtain information 

 as to the 24-hour energy requirement of young children, two 24-hour 



1 Benedict and Talbot, Carnegie Inst. Wash. Pub. No. 201, 1914. See, also, Benedict and 



Talbot, Am. Journ. Diseases of Children, 1912, 4, p. 129; and 1914, 8, p. 1. 



2 Benedict and Talbot, Carnegie Inst. Wash. Pub. No. 233, 1915. See, also, Benedict and Talbot, 



Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 1915, 1, p. 600, and Talbot, Am. Journ. Diseases of Children, 1917, 

 13, p. 495. 



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