Lizzy Lind af Hageby

Emilie Augusta Louise "Lizzy" Lind af Hageby (20 September 1878 – 26 December 1963) was a Swedish-British feminist and animal rights advocate who became a prominent anti-vivisection activist in England in the early 20th century. Born to a distinguished Swedish family, Lind af Hageby and Leisa Katherine Schartau (another Swedish activist) enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women in 1902 to advance their anti-vivisectionist education. The women attended vivisections at University College London, and in 1903 published their diary, The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology, which accused researchers of having vivisected a dog without adequate anaesthesia. The ensuing scandal, known as the Brown Dog affair, included a libel trial, damages for one of the researchers, and rioting in London by medical students. In 1906 Lind af Hageby co-founded the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society and later ran an animal sanctuary at Ferne House in Dorset with the Duchess of Hamilton. She became a British citizen in 1912, and spent the rest of her life writing and speaking about animal protection and the link between that and feminism. A skilled orator, she broke a record in 1913 for the number of words uttered during a trial, when she delivered 210,000 words and asked 20,000 questions during an unsuccessful libel suit she brought against the Pall Mall Gazette, which had criticized her campaigns. The Nation called her testimony "the most brilliant piece of advocacy that the Bar has known since the day of Russell, though it was entirely conducted by a woman."

Early life Born into a wealthy and noble Swedish family, Lind af Hageby was the granddaughter of the chamberlain to the King of Sweden, and the daughter of Emil Lind af Hageby, a prominent lawyer. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies College in England, which gave her access to the kind of education unavailable to most women at that time. This, combined with a private income from her family, enabled her to pursue her political activism, writing and travelling around the world to deliver lectures, first in opposition to child labour and prostitution, then in support of women's emancipation, and later animal rights. Lisa Gålmark writes that Lind af Hageby took to the streets, organizing rallies and speeches, when women of her class were expected to stay at home embroidering. When Lind af Hageby spoke to the Glasgow Vegetarian Society in 1914, a Daily Mail journalist reported that he had expected to find a "square jawed, high browed, slightly angular, and severely and intellectually frugal looking" woman, but instead found "a pretty, little, plump woman, with kind brown eyes, eyes that twinkle ... She was not even dowdy and undecorative. Her blue dress was ... pretty as anyone could wish." He wrote that he was "almost converted to vegetarianism" by her "straight, hard logic." After college Lind af Hageby spent time in Paris in 1900, where she and a Swedish friend, Leisa Katherine Schartau, visited the Pasteur Institute. They were distressed by the vivisection they saw there, and when they returned to Sweden joined the Nordiska samfundet till bekämpande av det vetenskapliga djurplågeriet (the Nordic Anti-Vivisection Society). Lind af Hageby became its honorary chair in 1901. In 1902 the women decided to enrol at the London School of Medicine for Women to gain the medical education they needed to train themselves as anti-vivisection activists.

The Shambles of Science

Lind af Hageby and Schartau began their studies at the London School of Medicine for Women in late 1902. The women's college did not perform vivisection, but its students had visiting rights at other London colleges, so Lind af Hageby and Schartau attended demonstrations at King's College and University College, the latter a centre of animal experimentation. The women kept a diary and in June 1903 showed it to Stephen Coleridge, secretary of the British National Anti-Vivisection Society. The 200-page manuscript contained one allegation, in a chapter called "Fun," that caught his eye, namely that a brown terrier dog had been operated on multiple times over a two-month period by several researchers, then dissected – without anaesthesia, according to the diary – in front of an audience of laughing medical students:

A large dog, stretched on its back on an operation board, is carried into the lecture-room by the demonstrator and the laboratory attendant. Its legs are fixed to the board, its head is firmly held in the usual manner, and it is tightly muzzled. There is a large incision in the side of the neck, exposing the gland. The animal exhibits all signs of intense suffering; in his struggles, he again and again lifts his body from the board, and makes powerful attempts to get free. If true, the allegations meant that the experiment had violated the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876, which required for that kind of procedure that the animal be anaesthetized and used once before being euthanized. (Other licences permitted the vivisection of conscious animals.) Coleridge accused Bayliss in public of having broken the law. Bayliss responded with a lawsuit. The trial opened in November 1903, by which time the diary had been published by Ernest Bell of Covent Garden, first as Eye-Witnesses, later as The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology. Lind af Hageby and Schartau testified that they had watched as the dog was brought into the lecture theatre, said they had not smelled or seen any apparatus that would deliver the A.C.E. mixture normally used as an anaesthetic. They testified that the dog had made movements they regarded as "violent and purposeful." Bayliss testified that the dog had been anaesthetized and was suffering from chorea, a disease that caused involuntary spasms. The jury accepted Bayliss's account and awarded him £2,000 with £3,000 costs. The publisher withdrew the diary and handed all remaining copies to Bayliss's lawyer. Lind af Hageby later republished it without the chapter called "Fun," and with a new chapter about the trial, printing a fifth edition by 1913. The protracted scandal prompted the government to set up the Second Royal Commission on Vivisection in 1907; it appointed vivisectors to the commission and allowed it to sit in private.

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