T. L. Nichols

Thomas Low Nichols (1815 – 1901) was an American physician, journalist, writer and advocate for a number of causes including free love, hydrotherapy, food and health reform, vegetarianism and spiritualism.

T. L. Nichols
Born
Thomas Low Nichols

1815 (1815)
Orford, New Hampshire, U.S.
Died1901 (aged 85–86)
Chaumont-en-Vexin, France
NationalityAmerican
EducationNew York University (MD, 1850)
Occupations
  • Physician
  • journalist
  • writer
  • activist
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1848; died 1884)​
Signature

Biography

Nichols was born in Orford, New Hampshire, in 1815. He studied medicine at Dartmouth College, until he dropped out and became a radical journalist.[1] Nichols apprenticed on newspapers in Lowell and New York, before becoming an editor and partial proprietor of the Buffalonian in 1837. An article he published while editor of The New York Aurora, led to him serving four months in prison for libel;[2] Nichols later published Journal in Jail, an account of his experience, in 1840.[3]

Thomas Nichols married Mary Gove in July 1848.[3][4] Nichols completed his MD at New York University in 1850.[4] Later, the couple founded a school for training water-cure therapists and published several books on health, food and other reforms.[3] Nichols was secretary of the American Hygienic and Hydropathic Association and the Society of Public Health and vice-president of the American Vegetarian Society.[1]

Drawing of Nichols in jail

Between 1853 and 1857, Nichols published two journals, Nichols' Monthly and Nichols' Journal, to advocate for his beliefs.[3] In Nichols' Monthly, he partially published an epistolary utopian story, which he infused with his beliefs about free love, universal suffrage and libertarianism; it was later published in novel form in 1860.[5]

For some time, the couple lived in Josiah Warren's Modern Times free love anarchist community, based on Long Island.[6] In 1856, the couple left and founded a "school of life", called the Memnonia Institute, based in Yellow Springs, Ohio.[7] It collapsed in 1857 and the couple converted to Roman Catholicism.[1]

The couple relocated to London to escape the American Civil War.[1] Nichols published two further novels Uncle Angus (1864) and Jerry (1872), as well as a best-selling autobiography Forty Years of American Life in 1864.[1] Nichols started the Co-operative Sanitary Company in 1875 and the couple co-founded a health publication, the Herald of Health. The couple campaigned for temperance and dress reform and against military conscription, vivisection, vaccinations and capital punishment.[1] They also helped create several vegetarian restaurants in London.[1]

Mary died in 1884; after her death, Nichols moved to Sutton, Surrey, where he continued to publish his pamphlets.[1]

Nichols later moved to Chaumont-en-Vexin, France, where he died in 1901, at the age of 85.[8]

Legacy

Animal rights and vegetarianism activist Ernest Bell, credited Nichols' pamphlet How to Live on Sixpence A-day, as the initial inspiration for his vegetarianism.[9]

Selected publications

References
  1. Aspinwall, Bernard (2004-09-23). "Nichols, Mary Sergeant Gove (1810–1884), campaigner for medical reform and women's rights". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/58353. Retrieved 2020-07-05. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. "Walking Tour: Walt Whitman's Printing House Square in New York City". Academy of American Poets. Retrieved 2020-07-07.
  3. Trahair, R. C. S. (1999). Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 286–287. ISBN 978-0-313-29465-5.
  4. Cayleff, Susan (2010). Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women's Health. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. pp. 112–113. ISBN 9781439904275. Retrieved August 25, 2020.
  5. "Authors: Nichols, Thomas Low". Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2020-07-07.
  6. D'Emilio, John; Freedman, Estelle B. (2012). Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, Third Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 115. ISBN 978-0-226-92381-9.
  7. Stearns, Bertha-Monica (1942). "Memnonia: The Launching of a Utopia". The New England Quarterly. 15 (2): 280–295. doi:10.2307/360527. ISSN 0028-4866. JSTOR 360527.
  8. Silver-Isenstadt, Jean L. (2002). Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols. Baltimore, Maryland: JHU Press. p. 248. ISBN 978-0-8018-6848-1.
  9. "Ernest Bell, President of the Vegetarian Society". The Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review. October 1933.

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