Lawyer, physician, and writer on health. And creator of hospitals - read on.
Born Shrewsbury. At Oxford University he became a vegetarian and a friend of Gandhi. First qualified as a barrister and then in 1897 as a doctor of medicine. Member of the Fruitarian Society. Director of Oriolet Fruitarian Hospital 1895 - c.1898. In 1898 he moved to London to found his own hospital - the anti-vivisection Hospital of St Francis, at 145 New Kent Road (closed 1902). 1903 founded the Lady Margaret Fruitarian Hospital in Bromley which had a chapel where Oldfield held services himself. President of the West London Food Reform Society, a vegetarian group based in Bayswater, founded in 1891. Founded the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment in 1901.
1903 he opened a hospital in Darenth House, 34 Camberwell Green - to be called the South London Hospital. It closed in 1904 and in 1906 was absorbed by the Battersea Hospital, the Anti-Vivisection Hospital. 1908 he founded the ' Fruitarian Village', the Margaret Manor hospital in Doddington, Kent. In 1921 the Bromley hospital relocated to the site at Lady Margaret Manor.
In WW1 served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Facebook shows a lovely menu cover (in which fruit features prominently) for the Officers’ Mess of the 3rd East Anglian Field Ambulance, whose Commanding Officer was Lt. Col. Josiah Oldfield. Spradbery, the designer of the cover, wrote: "The Colonel established a vegetarian mess and officers’ quarters … the place was popularly known as the Cabbage Patch."
Died Kent. His fruitarianism seems to have been vegetarianism in all but name. He is quoted: "I object absolutely to vegetarianism, because the word smacks of onions and cabbage."
Sources: People Pill, where this 1938 image shows Oldfield full length in a voluminous gown, and Lost Hospitals of London.
