On this day in vegan history · September 16, 1846
The Doctor Who Refused to Vivisect Her Way to a Degree
Born September 16, 1846, Anna Kingsford spent six years in a Paris medical school surrounded by animal experiments she called a kind of hell, and came out the other side with a medical degree and a book that argued the whole system was unnecessary.
The facts
- Born
- September 16, 1846, Stratford, Essex
- Medical degree
- Faculté de Médecine, University of Paris, 1880
- Thesis to book
- L'Alimentation Végétale de l'Homme (1880) became The Perfect Way in Diet (1881)
- Advocacy role
- Vice-president, the Vegetarian Society; founder, the Food Reform Society (1881)
Anna Kingsford was born on September 16, 1846, in Stratford, Essex, and became one of the first English women to earn a medical degree, enrolling at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris in 1874 and graduating in 1880. She refused to take part in the animal experiments that filled the curriculum around her, and wrote to her husband about the anguish of watching vivisections she had no power to stop. Her graduating thesis on the benefits of a vegetable diet was published in English in 1881 as The Perfect Way in Diet. She went on to serve as vice-president of the Vegetarian Society and to found the Food Reform Society that same year, arguing across Britain and Europe that medicine, and eating, did not require cruelty to work.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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I have found my Hell here in the Faculté de Médecine of Paris, a Hell more real and awful than any I have yet met with elsewhere, and one that fulfills all the dreams of the mediaeval monks.
Anna Kingsford, writing on 20 August 1879 about the animal experiments she witnessed at the Paris medical faculty
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Kingsford proved a medical education didn't require harming animals, then used the authority a medical degree gave her to make the case for vegetarianism and against vivisection to audiences who wouldn't have listened to an outsider. The Perfect Way in Diet is still cited as an early argument that ethics and science could point the same direction.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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