Louise Lind-af-Hageby

Louise Lind-af-Hageby

Emilie Augusta Louise "Lizzy" Lind af Hageby (20 September 1878 – 26 December 1963) was a Swedish feminist and animal rights advocate. She moved to England in 1902, where she became one of the country's most prominent anti-vivisection activists. She was the co-author with Leisa Schartau of The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology (1903), co-founded the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society (ADAVS), and ran an animal sanctuary at Ferne House in Dorset with the Duchess of Hamilton. She also founded The Anti-Vivisection Review in 1909, a journal she edited for 40 years.

Born into a distinguished Swedish family, she first came to public attention after she and Schartau decided in 1902 to study at the London School of Medicine for Women. In February 1903 they infiltrated the vivisection in University College London of a brown terrier dog they said was dissected while conscious before an audience of medical students, then included a vivid description of it in The Shambles of Science. The researcher insisted the dog had been anaesthetized and won a much-publicized libel suit. The ensuing controversy, known as the Brown Dog affair, lasted seven years and famously led to riots in London when 1,000 medical students, angered by the description of their work, clashed with police, suffragettes, and trade unionists.

Lind af Hageby spent the rest of her life writing and speaking about animal protection, and the link between feminism and vegetarianism. Such was her skill as an orator that one judge was moved to comment during another libel trial in 1913 – when she unsuccessfully sued the Pall Mall Gazette over claims that her campaigns were misleading – that she was "a woman of marvellous power," while 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." She spoke 210,000 words during the trial and asked 20,000 questions in her own defence, breaking a record for the number of words spoken during a case, at a time when women could not be admitted as lawyers in the UK.

She became a British citizen in 1912, and for several decades worked together with a small group of upper-class women – feminists and animal advocates – who sought to challenge the largely male medical establishment's attitude towards both animals and women.