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 October 18, 1899
 January 9, 1993
 British
 physiologist
Janet Vaughan, a physician and experimental physiologist who studied blood diseases, blood transfusion, the treatment of starvation, and the effects of radioactivity on bone and bone marrow, was the daughter of a well-known educator, William Wyamar Vaughan, headmaster of the Rugby School. One of her aunts was a founder of Somerville College, Oxford. She was educated at home until she was fifteen. She then went to North Foreland Lodge and from there to Somerville College, entering after passing the entrance examinations on her third try.
At Somerville, Vaughan developed a strong interest in biological sciences and studied under Charles Sherrington. Profiting from private tutoring by J. S. Haldane, she obtained a first-class degree in physiology. She stayed on at Oxford for two further postgraduate years studying physiology and pharmacology until a Goldsmith's scholarship to University College Hospital Medical School in London led her to study medicine. She qualified as a physician in 1924. A resident at South London Hospital for Women, she decided against general practice or consultancy because she wanted to spend weekends with her father following the death of her mother in 1925. Obtaining a post as assistant clinical pathologist at University College Hospital, she began to investigate treatment of anemias with liver extracts, preparing the extract herself. The results were encouraging and she received a Rockefeller traveling fellowship in 1929 that took her to George Richards Minot's laboratory at Harvard Medical School, where she experimented on anemias in pigeons.
Returning to London, she married David Goulay, who encouraged her to continue research. Obtaining Medical Research Council and other grants, she began to work with the histopathologist H.M. Turnbull, extending her investigations of blood and bone marrow diseases at the Department of Morbid Anatomy, University College Hospital. She managed to produce her first major textbook, THE ANEMIAS, just before the birth of her first daughter in 1934. This was perhaps the first British book on hematology. She continued in clinical pathology at the Postgraduate Medical School in London, and in 1936, published an important paper arguing that the release of immature red and white blood cells into the blood marrow was associated with infiltrative bone disease.
Concerned about the possibility of war following the rise of fascism in Europe, Vaughan was stimulated to try experiments on stored blood by the physiologist Duran Jorda, head of the Barcelona Blood Bank, who had fled from Spain following the collapse of the Republic at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Her suggestion that blood be banked for transfusion in case of war was adopted by the Medical Research Council. From the beginning of the World War II, Vaughan was made director of the North West London Blood Supply, with great success. She was awarded an Order of the British Empire before the end of the war for this work.
At the request of the Medical Research Council, Vaughan went to Belgium with Rosalind Pitt-Rivers and Charles Dent at the end of the war to investigate new treatments for starvation. Finding the British prisoners of war undernourished but not starving, Vaughan and her team continued on to Germany to the recently liberated concentration camp in Belsen and tried oral powdered milk rather than intravenous serum or hydrolysates.
In 1945, Vaughan was made principal of Somerville College, Oxford, a position she held until her retirement in 1967. She also brought up her two daughters during this period, held weekly medical clinics, and continued to have the support of her husband to advance her research. During this period, her experimental work was pursued in the department of pharmacology at Oxford. Reports from the Untied States suggested that strontium-90 was carcinogenic when incorporated into the bone, a question that Vaughan proposed to investigate with experiments on rabbits. With MRC grants, Vaughan made major studies that resulted in two books, published only after she retired from Somerville: THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BONE (1969) and THE EFFECTS OF IRRADIATION OF THE SKELETON (1973).
Vaughan also was a significant voice for medical education for women since she sat on an important commission (the Goodenough Committee) reviewing selection procedures by British medical schools. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1957 and to her great delight was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in1979 at the age of seventy-eight. She died in January 1993.
-- JH/MBO
Primary Sources
Vaughan, Janet. THE ANAEMIAS. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.
---. "Leuco-erythoblastic Anemias." JOURNAL OF PATHOLOGY AND BACTERIOLOGY
17 (1936): 541-64.
---. "Conditions at Belsen Concentration Camp." BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL,
"Physiology and treatment of Starvation ser." (1945): 819.
---. THE PHYSIOLOGY OF BONE. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
---. THE EFFECTS OF IRRADIATION OF THE SKELETON. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1973.
Standard Sources
BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS, vol. 41, 1995 (article by Maureen Owen); Debus;
WOMEN PHYSIOLOGISTS (article by Helen Dodsworth).
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