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The second half of the nineteenth century saw a transition into diverse theological, political, and social dissent. More women were readily able to train for medicine, and there was greater access to theological and intellectual freedom due to the increasing number of secular universities.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw a transition into diverse theological, political, and social dissent. More women were readily able to train for medicine, and there was greater access to theological and intellectual freedom due to the increasing number of secular universities. Ideas were challenged regarding how humans fit in the natural organism of the earth, having implications for the relationship between nature connectivity and the wellness of the soul, as well as the body, on both the individual and social level.

This paper examines Anna Kingsford’s The Perfect Way in Diet (1881) and Thomas Lowe Nichols’s The Diet Cure (1881), both texts emerging from the above contexts. Both were medical doctors; both were committed to vegetarianism; and both converted to Roman Catholicism while maintaining an interest in theosophy and mesmerism. The interconnectedness of health and moral wellbeing is explicitly articulated in both texts in theological and medical terms, while also extending to the public good—the wellbeing of the social soul—through economic and political benefits of health. I argue that their unconventional theological positions, alongside their medical training, provide a radical framework for health reform via dietetics; one that was sidelined because of its emphasis on vegetarianism, but, fascinatingly, borrows the theological historiography of successionism to tie their views not just to the innovations of science, but the perceived orthodoxy of primitivism.

Lesa Scholl is Dean of Queen’s College, University of Melbourne, and Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research examines the history of food consumption and hunger in nineteenth-century Britain through the lenses of economic, religious, and cultural history. Her most recent publications include Food Restraint and Fasting in Victorian Religion and Literature (Bloomsbury 2022), Hunger, Poetry, and the Oxford Movement (Bloomsbury 2020), and Hunger Movements in Early Victorian Literature (Routledge 2016). She was Editor-in-Chief of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. Her current research engages with medical and theological understandings of nutrition, the relationship between body and soul, and public health. Lesa is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.