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Will's a trooper if he read through that whole letter.
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Oct 28, 1909

Dear Will,

You know what to expect when you get letters from me at such rapid rates.  I don’t know whether you prefer more frequent requests for smaller sums or longer immunity at a higher price per.  Perhaps the later unless you are getting over your aversion to letter writing.  For a hundred dollars I would let you off for at least this year.

We go to Chicago a week from Saturday and stay until Dec. 23 at least.  I find my work getting very interesting.  This a.m. I took a test breakfast and began work on it in the lab.  I did not have much trouble with the tummy tube tho some of the girls of the class were pretty well used up due to the inexperience and poor instruction of the nurses in the lactics [???] treatment rooms.  I will send you directions and material for a test + if you would care to have a gastric chart I will be glad to make it.  Unless you should be entirely lacking in [illegible] HCl the gastric juice will keep for several days, so you could mail it to me without it deteriorating enroute.  My acidity was normal but Mabel’s is very low and Dr. Risley presented a diet for her.

The test meal consists of 1 ½ or 2 oz of breakfast toast to be fletcherized and 6 oz of physiological salt solution.  I will weigh out the salt and send it in a capsule and let you furnish the water.  One hour after the beginning of the meal which should be consumed in 20 minutes it is taken up with the tube.  This is called the breakfast.  Then 100 cc of water are taken and removed thru the tube.  This is the ‘lavage.’  Both are litiated [???] with NaOH to compute the total stomach contents.  The dilution caused by 100 cc is the point to be determined.  The rest is algebra.  Send me the whole breakfast and at least 10 cc of the lavage (the clear liquid).  In swallowing the tube be careful not to get it down your Sunday throat.  Breathe thru the mouth deeply and keep all your muscles relaxed as well as you can.  If you gag take full breaths.  It is not a very severe ordeal if properly managed.  The bulb is to be used as a suction pump by pinching the tube alternately above and below as you work the bulb.

​There is another simple test, of improved nature, for guessing at the digestive activity of the gastric juice and mobility of liver [???].  A 1 grain methaline blue tablet is wrapped in rubber dam [???] and tied with catgut.  This will digest in the stomach but not in the intestine.  If your gastric juice is sufficiently active the ligature will be digested and the methylene blue liberated and absorbed.  This will appear in the urine.  The directions are to observe the urine at three hour intervals after taking the pill and noting the first appearance of blue urine the blue is harmless.  If you get the breakfast here by Tuesday or Wednesday [illegible] finish it by Friday (with [illegible]


[That’s all there is.]
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1.
Note that I put with the scans:

About Fred’s 1909 letters to Will…

4/18/1909    1909-04-18 LETTER FROM FRED TO WILL
9/20/1909    ​1909-09-20 LETTER FROM FRED TO WILL
10/28/1909   ​1909-10-28 LETTER FROM FRED TO WILL

What AG had was photocopies of them, not the actual letters.  They looked as though they had gotten wet, so I imagine they were copied and then thrown out as not salvageable.

Conceivably the reason this letter looks unfinished is that their were more pages but they were so badly damaged that they couldn't even be photocopied.  Drat!

2.
Why did Fred use only the front of the stationery for this letter?

3.
My acidity was normal but Mabel’s is very low and Dr. Risley presented a diet for her.
Of course I wonder if Mabel's low acidity was somehow related to her later tuberculosis.  But I am not a doctor, so I have no idea.  And anyway, I'm guessing that it was in Angola that she acquired the tuberculosis.  But maybe she was vulnerable?

4.
The test meal consists of 1 ½ or 2 oz of breakfast toast to be fletcherized and 6 oz of physiological salt solution.
Fletcherize: To chew your food umpteen times before swallowing it.  When I was a child my parents told me a specific number.  40-something maybe.  My parents weren't recommending it; it was just something they joked about.

5.
In swallowing the tube be careful not to get it down your Sunday throat.

​Here’s something from 

https://webnerhouse.wordpress.com/2016/03/06/down-the-sunday-throat/

“Sunday throat”?  It’s a curious expression.  Of course, when you’re a kid and it’s something your Mom says as she’s pounding you on the back, trying to dislodge a piece of hamburger lodged near your Adam’s apple, it doesn’t seem weird.  Kids tend to assume that every word their Mom uses must, by definition, be commonplace.  It’s only when you get older and start to get weird looks when you use phrases like “Sunday throat” or “elbow grease” that you begin to realize that maybe the Momisms that you know so well aren’t widely used at all.

“Sunday throat” falls into that category.  A Google search doesn’t turn up much; the World Wide Words website, in response to a question from a fellow Midwesterner, found only a few uses of the phrase in literature to describe choking, and concluded that “Sunday” is being used in the sense of “special” or “alternative,” as in “Sunday best.”  I think that’s not quite right.  I always assumed that the “Sunday throat” was the throat that didn’t work — as in Sunday being the traditional day of rest.
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