Josiah Oldfield was an English lawyer, physician and promoter of his own variant of fruitarianism which was virtually indistinguishable from lacto-ovo vegetarianism.
34 Facts About Josiah Oldfield
2.
Josiah Oldfield became a versatile author, a prolific writer of popular books on dietary and health topics.
3.
The son of David Oldfield of Ryton, Shropshire, a provision dealer, and his wife Margaret Bates, he was born on 28 February 1863 in Shrewsbury.
4.
Josiah Oldfield's father, who died in 1903, was a church organist in nearby Condover from around the time of Josiah's birth.
5.
Josiah Oldfield then taught as an assistant master at Chipping Campden School.
6.
Josiah Oldfield was called to the bar by Lincoln's Inn, and practised as a barrister on the Oxford court circuit.
7.
Josiah Oldfield then studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School and qualified in 1897.
8.
Josiah Oldfield was President of the West London Food Reform Society, a vegetarian group based in Bayswater, founded in 1891.
9.
Josiah Oldfield met Gandhi through Pranjivan Mehta, in 1890, and the two became friends, sharing rooms in Bayswater for some months in 1891.
10.
Further, Josiah Oldfield was associated with the London Vegetarian Society and editor for their publication, The Vegetarian.
11.
Josiah Oldfield was the secretary of the Vegetarian Federal Union.
12.
Josiah Oldfield was a member of the Order of the Golden Age and the Humanitarian League.
13.
In 1895, Josiah Oldfield searched for alternatives to leather for boots, experimenting with boots made from India rubber, gutta-percha, and asbestos.
14.
Josiah Oldfield found faults with all of those substances, but expressed optimism about a "vegetarian" boot.
15.
Josiah Oldfield advocated for fruitarianism, putting him at odds with the Vegetarian Society.
16.
Josiah Oldfield was a member of the Fruitarian Society, whose members lived on "the produce of harvest field, garden, forest and orchard, with milk, butter, cheese, eggs and honey".
17.
Josiah Oldfield admitted patients there, initially employed with title Warden, supported by a medical officer.
18.
In 1897 Josiah Oldfield announced the foundation of the Hospital of St Francis in South London, on anti-vivisection principles.
19.
Josiah Oldfield was senior physician to the Lady Margaret Fruitarian Hospital in Bromley, which he founded in 1903.
20.
Josiah Oldfield founded the fruitarian Margaret Manor hospital in Doddington, Kent.
21.
Josiah Oldfield shared the pacifist views of the Order of the Golden Age.
22.
Josiah Oldfield's service came to an end in 1918, when he was thrown from a horse.
23.
Josiah Oldfield founded the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment in the same year.
24.
Josiah Oldfield became chairman of the Romilly Society, a pressure group for penal reform founded in 1897, in 1910.
25.
Josiah Oldfield made an investigative visit to India in 1901.
26.
Josiah Oldfield's experiences formed the material of a series of articles in The Leisure Hour.
27.
Josiah Oldfield became a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1920.
28.
Josiah Oldfield died in 1953 at the age of 89, in Doddington, Kent.
29.
In 1891, Josiah Oldfield attempted to convert Gandhi to Anglicanism, urging him to read the Bible.
30.
Josiah Oldfield concluded that a "wider conception of God" was needed.
31.
Josiah Oldfield is listed in A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists as a theist with mystic ideas about the soul.
32.
Josiah Oldfield was a proponent of evolution conceived as based on cooperation rather than competition.
33.
Josiah Oldfield married Gertrude Hick on 29 September 1899 at Wakefield Cathedral; she was the daughter of Matthew Bussey Hick of Wakefield, and sister of the doctor Henry Hick.
34.
Josiah Oldfield had two daughters named Josie: Josie Margaret Oldfield, with Irene Doreen Oldfield one of the twins; and Josie Magdalen Oldfield, born 1906 and identified in the 1911 census.