Background
Katherine Bitting was born in Canada.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Katherine Bitting
Edit ProfileEducation
Bitting earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the Salem Normal School, now Salem State University, studied bacteriology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Masters of Science in Biology from Purdue University in 1892, where she became an instructor soon after graduating.
Career
She was a prolific author on the topic of food preservation. Bitting held a position with the Perdue Agricultural Extension Station while completing her masters thesis and in 1893 she became an assistant professor for biology, structural botany, bacteriology. In September 1907 Bitting was appointed as a microanalyst in the chemistry division of the United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Chemistry, where she worked with Avril Bitting and gained expertise on food preservation and related topics, authoring nearly fifty pamphlets in that subject area.
Her 4,346 volume collection of gastronomic literature from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries now resides at the Library of Congress" Rare Books and Special Collections Division.She amassed a large collection of materials in order: "To facilitate her investigations, as the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress (1940) states, she collected "materials on the sources, preparation, and consumption of foods, their chemistry, bacteriology, preservations, et cetera, from earliest times to the present day.".
