In his early years in South Africa, Gandhi read two books by heterodox Christians that made a great impression on him. One was The Perfect Way, by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. Kingsford was the first Englishwoman to get a medical degree, studying in Paris, where she persuaded her teachers that she could qualify to be a doctor without cutting up a single animal. On returning home, she became active in the Vegetarian Society. Maitland was a religious dissenter: the son of a priest, himself trained to take holy orders, he instead became a Theosophist.
