The House of Alice Roughton: Cambridge Doctor, Humanist, Patron and Activist

From her home at 9 Adams Road in the university city of Cambridge, Alice Roughton (19001995) demonstrated a strongly altruistic lifestyle, housing young students, the mentally ill, artists, intellectuals, friends, persecuted homosexuals and refugees (German Jews in 1939, Hungarians in 1956 and Chileans in 1973). She practiced psychiatry and general medicine alongside personal activism such as medics against nuclear warfare and opposing the financing of urbanisation the latter related to the destruction of the historical centres of English cities. Alice was a patron of artists and intellectuals, including the Catalan musician Robert Gerhard and the German dancer Kurt Jooss. She befriended the economists J. M. Keynes and Joan Robinson, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, the molecular biologist James Watson, as well as the composer Benjamin Britten, who held memorable concerts at her house, as well as many other dignitaries of science and the