Janet Vaughan

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Standing. 2nd from left: Joseph W. Mountin - 2nd from right: Henry E. Sigerist . Sitting. Left to right: John HL Cumpston , John A. Ryle , Weldon Dalrymple-Champneys and Janet Vaughan . --- In front of a clinic in Lahore in 1944.

Dame Janet Maria Vaughan (married name Gourlay , born October 18, 1899 in Clifton, today a district of Bristol in England , † January 9, 1993 in Oxford ) was a British doctor and physiologist .

Live and act

Janet's father, William Wyamar Vaughan, was the director of private schools (Clifton College 1890-1904, Giggleswick School 1904-1910, Wellington College, Berkshire 1910-1921, Rugby School 1921-1931). Her mother Margret Symonds (1869-1925) was the daughter of the historian and writer John Addington Symonds . Janet had two younger brothers and a younger sister who died as a child.

Janet Vaughan studied medicine at Somerville College , Oxford from 1919 . She received her clinical training at University College Hospital in London until 1925 .

During her clinical training in the London slum of Camden Town , she was confronted with the living conditions of the socially declassified, which strengthened her already existing socialist convictions. In the 1930s she became active in the Committee for Spanish Medical Aid in support of the Republican Movement in Spain.

After her mother's death in 1925, she gave up her original goal of becoming a practicing doctor and specialized in clinical pathology . So she was able to look after her father on weekends. When the father remarried in 1929, she was released from this obligation. In September 1930 she married David Gourlay (1889 / 90–1963), with whom they had two children, Mary (* 1933) and Priscilla (* 1934).

Blood transfusion device

hematology

Inspired by the discovery of the American George Richards Minot about the positive effect of administration of liver extracts in the treatment of pernicious anemia , she secretly made patients eat chopped raw liver. These patients recovered very quickly, which the treating doctor attributed to his treatment with arsenic . Encouraged by Charles Harington , she prepared extracts from minced liver in her apartment and tried them on herself. She was given permission for further experiments on patients. The results were consistently good and so she had material for her doctoral thesis, which she completed in 1931.

1934 Janet Vaughan was at the newly opened British Postgraduate Medical School hired as an assistant in clinical pathology and with the Hammersmith Hospital necessary tasks of Hematology in charge and the blood transfusion.

In the course of her activities to support the Republican Movement in the Spanish Civil War , she received the information that blood stored in the hinterland was being transported to the front in cold chains and successfully used in the initial treatment of the injured. She invited the Spanish hematologist Frederic Durán-Jordà to London to give a lecture on this method. During his visits to the Soviet Union, Henry E. Sigerist learned that blood was drawn from the dead and kept refrigerated for reuse. Sigerist witnessed how the blood of a hanged man was obtained for this purpose. Janet Vaughan then also prepared the construction of a small blood bank for the transfusion department in London's Hammersmith Hospital, which she directed. In view of the threat of war under the Munich Agreement , she and a few colleagues planned to set up a national blood transfusion service. The British government accepted this plan and commissioned the Medical Research Council (MRC) to carry it out. For the duration of the war, Vaughan was entrusted with the supervision of the operation of the London north-west blood depot.

Bhore Committee

In autumn 1944 Vaughan was invited by the Indian colonial government to tour the country with a group of foreign doctors and to analyze the structures of the local health care system. This analysis served the Indian «Bhore Committee», which was founded in 1943 by Sir Joseph William Bhore (1878–1960), as an argumentation aid for a report completed in 1946 with recommendations for the development of a structured health system in India.

Somerville College

Somerville College

From 1945 to 1967, Janet Vaughan was the director of Somerville College .

Brussels - Bergen-Belsen

As the end of the war approached, the MRC sent Vaughan to Brussels . Its purpose was to help regain strength from liberated but starved British soldiers. In Bergen-Belsen she then investigated the value of giving concentrated protein food in the treatment of former prisoners who were threatened with dying of emaciation. In their own judgment: "Trying to do science in Hell."

plutonium

After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki , Vaughan was the head of a small group of scientists from various disciplines that investigated the biological effects of radioisotopes accumulated in the bones on behalf of the MRC . It turned out that the individual radioactive elements showed significant differences. Vaughan was soon recognized worldwide as the authority on issues related to plutonium accumulation in bones.

Memberships and honors

Fonts (selection)

  • The Anaemias . Oxford University Press, London 1934.
  • Leuco-erythoblastic Anemias , Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology, Volume 17 (1936), pp. 541-64.
  • Conditions at Belsen Concentration Camp , British Medical Journal, Physiology and treatment of starvation ser. (1945): 819.
  • The physiology of bone . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1970.
  • The Effects of Radiation on the Skeleton . Claredon Press, Oxford 1973.

literature

  • Rose George: A very naughty little girl. The extraordinary life of Janet Vaughan, who changed our relationship with blood . (Digitized version)
  • Richard Doll. Vaughan (married name Gourlay), Dame Janet Maria (1899-1993) . In: Oxford Dictionary (digitized)
  • Janet Vaughan , in: Sheila Rowbotham : A Century of Women. The History of Women in Britain and the United States . London: Viking, 1997 ISBN 0-670-87420-5 , p. 640

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ MR L'organization des services de transfusion au front d'Aragon. In: Internationales Ärztliches Bulletin, 4th year (1937), Issue 4–5 (May-June), pp. 43–45. Here in particular p. 45 (digitized version)
  2. ^ Rose George: A Very Naughty Little Girl: The extraordinary life of Janet Vaughan, who changed our relationship with blood. Longreads.com, March 1, 2015, accessed June 3, 2018 .
  3. Henry E. Sigerist. Socialised Medicine in the Soviet Union. With a foreword by Sidney Webb . Victor Gollancz, London 1937, p. 303: “… When I was visiting the Sklifasovski Hospital for Traumatic Diseases in Moscow, the corps of a man who had just committed suicide by hanging was brought in and I had the opportunity to see how blood was taken from cadavers to serve for transfusion. ... "
  4. Barbara Harvey, Louise Johnson: Obituary: Dame Janet Vaughan. The Independent , January 12, 1993, accessed June 3, 2018 .
  5. Henry E. Sigerist. The Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine during the academic year 1944-1945. … III Field Work in Canada and India. In: Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, Volume 18 (1945), p. 231
  6. ^ Henry E. Sigerist: Report on India. In: Milton I. Roemer (Ed.): Henry E. Sigerist on the Sociology of Medicine. MD Publications, New York 1960, pp. 288-296.