Dame Janet Maria Vaughan DBE, FRS (18 October 1899 – 9 January 1993) was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 physiologist

Physiology

Physiology is the science of the function of living systems. This includes how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and bio-molecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. The highest honor awarded in physiology is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or...

.

Born in Clifton

Clifton, Bristol

Clifton is a suburb of the City of Bristol in England, and the name of both one of the city's thirty-five council wards. The Clifton ward also includes the areas of Cliftonwood and Hotwells...

, Bristol

Bristol

Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...

, she was the daughter of William Wyamar Vaughan

William Wyamar Vaughan

William Wyamar Vaughan was a British educationalist.Vaughan was the son of Sir Henry Halford Vaughan, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. In 1898 he married Margaret Symmonds, daughter of John Addington Symonds; they had two sons and a daughter. Their daughter was noted physiologist,...

, a cousin of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

 and later headmaster of Rugby

Rugby School

Rugby School is a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England. It is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain.-History:...

.

Educated at home, and later at North Foreland Lodge and Somerville College

Somerville College, Oxford

Somerville College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, and was one of the first women's colleges to be founded there...

, Oxford, where she studied under Charles Sherrington and JBS Haldane.

From 1945 until her retirement in 1967, she was Principal of Somerville College. She was made DBE in 1957, and elected FRS in 1979. She was Principal while Margaret Roberts studied there - a student who would later become British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...

.

Personal life

She married Denis Gourley, of the Wayfarers' Travel Agency, in 1930; they had two daughters.

External links

• Royal College of Physicians profile of Dame Janet Vaughan contains a detailed account of her life, based in part on her 1993 Independent obituary
• Red Gold: Inovators & Pioneers — Jane Vaughan, PBS
  Public Broadcasting Service
  The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
  
  
• ODNB biography
• Dame Janet Maria Vaughan, D.B.E. by Maureen Owen, 1995, JSTOR
  JSTOR
  JSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...
  
  
• British Journal of Haematology information (password protected)