Gandhi and the 'struck-off' doctor, Thomas Richard Allinson (1858-1918)

Gandhi visited London on several occasions. During two of these visits, when he was a law student from 1888 and again in 1914, he met Thomas Richard Allinson, a controversial doctor whose name was erased from the Medical Register in 1892. While in London studying for the bar, Gandhi was influenced in his search for a suitable vegetarian diet by the writings and personal support of Allinson. Although disagreeing profoundly with Allinson's views on birth control, he spoke up in defence of his right to hold them--probably the first time Gandhi challenged authority and an occasion which shows him as a tongue-tied young man but even then having a personal moral code that gives insight into the character of the future Mahatma. On Gandhi's further visit to England in 1914 Allinson, although no longer on the Medical Register, treated Gandhi for pleurisy, apparently partially successfully when orthodox medicine had failed.