Around Swedish America in 548 Days - Day 211

Day 211 - Yale University

Berzelius Hall, at the corner of Temple and Trumbull Streets and Whitney Avenue, near the campus of Yale University, is a large, white granite building named for the famed Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779—1848). The structure is used by a Yale society.

Berzelius never set foot in America, but he has had several prominent countrymen at Yale university. The first swedish-born faculty member was the linguist Hjalmar Edgren who started teaching French in 1874 and later also was an instructor in Sanskrit and comparative philology. In 1900 Gustav Andreen was the chair of the Scandinavian languages department at the university before assuming the presidency of Augustana College at Rock Island. Adolph Benson, the son of a blacksmith from Skåne, was for a long time professor of Geman and Scandinavian languages, while he conducted research about the historical relations between Sweden and America in his spare time. Rudolph Anderson from Västergötland was the professor of chemistry between 1927-1948, before he obtained his doctorate in biochemistry at Cornell. He became an international authority on the chemistry of bacteria, and in particular those that led to leprosy and tuberculosis. A colloquium program at the university exploring new and emerging fields of chemistry since 1970 honors him by being called The Rudolph Anderson Symposia in Chemistry.