Background
Born in Clifton, Bristol, she was the daughter of William Wyamar Vaughan, a cousin of Virginia Woolf and later headmaster of Rugby.
Born in Clifton, Bristol, she was the daughter of William Wyamar Vaughan, a cousin of Virginia Woolf and later headmaster of Rugby.
Vaughan was educated at home, and later at North Foreland Lodge and Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied medicine under Charles Sherrington and J. B. South. Haldane.
From 1945 to 1967, she was Principal of Somerville College, Oxford. Later she received a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study at Harvard University. As a female doctor, discovered that she had difficulties gaining access to the patients and experimented on pigeons.
Virginia Woolf described her as "an attractive woman.
Competent, disinterested, taking blood tests all day to solve abstract problems". She suffered from prejudice for her research.
As a young pathologist at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith Hospital in 1938 she initiated creation of national blood banks in London, setting one up with Federico Duran-Jorda. The modified milk bottle for blood collection and storage was named "Medical Research Council bottle" or "Janet Vaughan".
From 1945 until her retirement in 1967, she was Principal of Somerville College.
She was Principal while Shirley Catlin (later Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby) and Margaret Roberts (who would later become the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) studied there. She studied blood disease, blood transfusion, the treatment of starvation, and the effect of radioactivity on the bone and bone marrow.
Royal Society.