Alma mater Newnham College | Name Alice Johnson | |
Died January 13, 1940
Cambridge Institutions Balfour Laboratory
Society for Psychical Research
Newnham College Main interests early development of the newt | ||
Join lisa wilcox alice johnson at the johnson s house burbank ca
Alice Johnson (7 July 1860 – 13 January 1940) was an English zoologist. She also edited the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research from 1899 to 1916.
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Life
The daughter of William Henry Farthing Johnson, a private school master, and Harriet Brimsley, she was born in Cambridge. Her brother was the logician William Ernest Johnson. She was educated in Cambridge and Dover, entering Newnham College in 1878. In 1881, she was placed in the equivalent of the First Class of the Natural Sciences Tripos (at that time, as a woman, she was not permitted to earn a degree). From 1884 to 1890, she was a demonstrator in animal morphology at the Balfour Laboratory. She continued her studies with Francis Balfour and, after Balfour's death in 1882, with Adam Sedgwick. Her research included studies of the early development of the newt. In 1884, she published the first paper by a woman to appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. She also published a study on the development of cranial nerves in the newt embryo with Lilian Sheldon, then a student at Newnham College.
In 1890, she became private secretary to Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, a leading figure in the Society for Psychical Research. Johnson was secretary for the Society from 1903 to 1907 and was its research officer from 1907 to 1916. She assisted in the so-called "Brighton experiments" in thought transference. Johnson also worked for the Society on the Census of Hallucinations. She prepared the work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by Frederic W. H. Myers for publication; it had been left uncompleted after Myers' death. Johnson resigned from the SPR in 1917.
Eleanor Sidgwick became principal for Newnham College in 1892 and Johnson served as her secretary until 1903. From 1893 to 1902, Johnson was also an associate of the college.
She died in Cambridge at the age of 79.