T. L. Nichols
Thomas Low Nichols (December 13, 1815 – July 8, 1901) was an American doctor, journalist, writer and activist who promoted ideas like free love, hydrotherapy, vegetarianism, health reform and spiritualism.
Born in Orford, New Hampshire, he began studying medicine at Dartmouth but left to work as a radical journalist in Lowell and New York. As editor and part-owner of the Buffalonian, he published articles that led to a four‑month prison term for libel; he later wrote about the experience in Journal in Jail (1840). He married Mary Gove in 1848 and earned his medical degree from New York University in 1850. The couple opened a school for water‑cure therapists and published books on health and reform.
Nichols was active in hygienic and public‑health groups and started two journals, Nichols’ Monthly and Nichols’ Journal, in the 1850s. He published Esperanza, a utopian tale, in 1860. After time with Josiah Warren’s Modern Times community, they founded the Memnonia Institute in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which soon failed, and the couple converted to Roman Catholicism. They moved to London during the Civil War, where Nichols continued writing, helped found the Co‑operative Sanitary Company, and promoted temperance, dress reform and vegetarianism, as well as helping to create vegetarian restaurants and health publications.
Mary Nichols died in 1884, and Nichols later lived in Sutton, Surrey, before moving to Chaumont-en-Vexin, France, where he died in 1901 at age 85. He is remembered as an early advocate of vegetarianism in Britain; in 1879 he opened London’s first vegetarian restaurant, the Alpha, at 23 Oxford Street, which served hundreds of meals daily and sold his writings. The Alpha and related ventures influenced many vegetarians, including Ernest Bell and A. W. Duncan, and helped spark the vegetarian movement in England.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 12:53 (CET).