Janet Vaughan
Dame Janet Maria Vaughan, Mrs Gourlay (18 October 1899 – 9 January 1993), was a British physiologist, academic, and academic administrator. She researched haematology and radiation pathology. From 1945 to 1967, she served as Principal of Somerville College, Oxford. Early life Born in Clifton, Bristol, she 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. At the time of her birth he was an assistant master at Clifton College. She was educated at home, and later at North Foreland Lodge and Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied medicine under Charles Sherrington and J. B. S. Haldane. She did her clinical training at University College Hospital, London, where she worked in London's slums and saw firsthand the effects of poverty on health. Later she received a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study at Harvard University. Career 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". In 1932, Vaughan, her co-driver and fellow medic Dr.