Dr. Anna Mary Kingsford: Victorian Occultist
Looking for an icon? How about Doctor Anna Mary Kingsford: physician, clairvoyant, poet, vegetarian, author, just to name a few.
Born in 1846 she was said to be clairvoyant since birth, the youngest of 12 she spent much of her childhood pursuing interests of nature, mythology, and insisting she was really from the fairy realm. Adults found discomfort around her as she would have accurate premonitions of deaths, to the point she was treated medically abnormal and suffered unknown treatments as a result.
However she was so talented in the arts that she was a published author by 13, and as an adult independent in her own means and able to live the life she wanted. At 21 she married a distant cousin, although she had many suitors, but her new husband supported her interests, some of which he shared. Seven years later while he was a minister, she attended Paris Medical School. She was the only woman in her classes, and traveled between England and Paris as no medical school in her birth country would accept her. Rather than keep her head down and be grateful for the opportunity, she was very vocal on her abhorrence of vivisection, the practice of performing demonstrative operations on live animals. She never participated and actively campaigned against it all her life, adopting vegetarianism into her diet and writing her thesis on the subject, but was refrained from presenting it in front of colleagues, some of who supported her but others who were vehemently against her stance and her gender. With some revisions she was able to present her thesis but the uproar garnered so much attention that a demand formed for her original work, which she published in 1881 under the title The Perfect Way Diet.
She turned to England and set up a medical practice, and admitted to the Theosophical Society, which immediately offered her the president of the London Lodge. She published much on the mystical, theological, occultist, diet, and women's health and beauty, before her death at the age of 41. Even in death her works were referenced and published posthumously, including this copy of Dreams and Dream Stories which published the same year as her death.
