with a gift "for seeing apparitions and divining the characters and fortunes of people", something she reportedly learned to keep silent about. She married her cousin, Algernon Godfrey Kingsford in 1867 when she was 21, giving birth to a daughter, Eadith, a year later. Though her husband was an Anglican priest, she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1872. Kingsford contributed articles to the magazine "Penny Post" from 1868 to 1873. Having been left £700 a year by her father, she bought in 1872 The Lady's Own Paper, and took up work as its editor, which brought her into contact with some prominent women of the day, including the writer, feminist, and anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe. It was an article by Cobbe on vivisection in The Lady's Own Paper that sparked Kingsford's interest in the subject. Studies and research In 1873, Kingsford met the writer Edward Maitland, a widower, who shared her rejection of materialism. With the blessing of Kingsford's husband, the two began to collaborate, Maitland accompanying her to Paris when she decided to study medicine. Paris was at that time the center of a revolution in the study of physiology, much of it as a result of experiments on animals, particularly dogs, and mostly conducted without anaesthetic. Claude Bernard (1813–1878), described as the "father of physiology", was working there, and famously said that "the physiologist is not an ordinary man: he is a scientist, possessed and absorbed by the scientific idea he pursues. He does not hear the cries of the animals, he does not see their flowing blood, he sees nothing but his idea ..." Walter Gratzer, professor emeritus of biochemistry at King's College London, writes that significant opposition to vivisection emerged in Victorian England, in part in revulsion at the research being conducted in France. Bernard and other well-known physiologists, such as Charles Richet in France and Michael Foster in England, were strongly criticized for their work. British anti-vivisectionists infiltrated the lectures in Paris of François Magendie, Bernard's teacher, who dissected dogs without anaesthesia, allegedly shouting at them — "Tais-toi, pauvre bête!" (Shut up, you poor beast!) — while he worked. Bernard's wife, Marie-Francoise Bernard, was violently opposed to his research, though she was financing it through her dowry. In the end, she divorced him and set up an anti-vivisection society. This was the atmosphere in the faculty of medicine and the teaching hospitals in Paris when