Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Harvard University (Ivy League), 2 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Dame Janet
Maria Vaughan
DBE
FRS (18 October 1899 – 9 January 1993), sometimes known by her
married name of Gourlay, was a British
physiologist, academic, and
academic administrator.[1][2]
She researched in
haematology and radiation pathology. From 1945 to 1967, she served as
Principal of
Somerville College, Oxford. Hilda Matheson lived with two friends,
Marjorie Graves and Janet Vaughan (later to become Principal of Somerville),
in South Kensington. Both women were aware of her relationship with
Vita
Sackville-West and were sympathetic towards it. According to Matheson,
Marjorie had "a ribald tongue, enriched by a classical education and a past (I
should guess) of her own."
Born in
Clifton, Bristol, Vaughan was the eldest of four children of
William Wyamar Vaughan (a maternal first cousin of
Virginia Woolf and later headmaster of
Rugby) and Margaret "Madge" Symonds, daughter of
John Addington Symonds
(Madge Vaughan, was probably writer Virginia Woolf's
first same-sex crush, though there is no evidence that the feeling was mutual).[3]
At the time of her birth
John Addington Symonds was an assistant master at
Clifton College. She was educated at home, and later at
North Foreland Lodge and
Somerville College, Oxford,[3]
where she studied medicine under
Charles Sherrington and
J. B. S. Haldane. She did her clinical training at
University College Hospital, London,[1]
where she worked in London's slums and saw firsthand the effects of poverty on
health.[3]
Later she received a scholarship from the
Rockefeller Foundation to study at Harvard University.[4]
Janet Vaughan, Principal (1945–1967),
Claude Rogers (1907–1979),
Somerville College, University of Oxford
As a woman doctor, Vaughan had difficulties gaining access to patients and
experimented on pigeons. Woolf described her as 'an attractive woman;
competent, disinterested, taking blood tests all day to solve abstract
problems'.[4]
She suffered from prejudice for her research.[5]
As a young pathologist at the
Royal Postgraduate Medical School at
Hammersmith Hospital in 1938 she initiated creation of national blood
banks in London, setting one up with Federico Duran-Jorda. The modified milk
bottle for blood collection and storage was named "MRC
bottle" or "Janet Vaughan".[4][6]
In 1945 she was sent to Belgium by the Medical Research Council to research
starvation, and then into Germany; at war's end she was working in the
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and significantly improved the strategy
to feed people suffering from extreme starvation.[1]
Vaughan's research included blood disease, blood transfusion, the treatment
of starvation, and the effect of radioactivity on the bone and bone marrow.[7]
Her 1934 book, The Anaemias, was one of the first specialised
treatments of blood diseases. After the war, she became known for her work on
the effects of
plutonium.[1]
From 1945 until her retirement in 1967, while working as a researcher at
the
Churchill Hospital, she was
Principal of Somerville College. She was Principal while Shirley Catlin
(later
Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby) and Margaret Roberts (who
would later become the British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher) studied there. She also served on the
Royal Commission on Equal Pay, as a founder trustee of the
Nuffield Foundation, and for one year as chairman of the Oxford Regional
Hospital Board.[1]
Vaughan was appointed
Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1957
New Year Honours.[8]
Oxford University awarded her an honorary
DCL in 1967.[1]
She was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1979.[9]
She married David Gourlay, of the Wayfarers' Travel Agency, in 1930. They
had two daughters,[1]
Mary (1932) and Frances (1935).[10]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Vaughan
- Britannia's Glory: A History of Twentieth Century Lesbians
Emily Hamer
Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct 6, 2016