Ann Wigmore

Ann Wigmore (1909 – 1994) was a Lithuanian–American "holistic health" practitioner and raw food advocate. Wigmore wrote several books on her theories and lectured widely to promote her practices.

On February 16, 1994, Wigmore died of smoke inhalation from a fire at the Boston site of the original Hippocrates Health Institute.

Wigmore was born Anna Marie Warapicki in Lithuania on March 4, 1909 to Antanas (1877-1959) and Anna (1882-?) Warapicki. Antanas emigrated to America in 1908, settling in Middleboro, Massachusetts, where he first worked as a laborer in a shoe manufacturing company, then later as a truck driver for a bakery during Wigmore's American teen-age years. Anna followed her husband five years later, aboard the ship Erlangen, arriving at Ellis Island on June 16, 1913. After World War I, Anna Marie, then 13, and her brother, Mykola, age 15, (both surnames erroneously entered on the ship's passenger log as "Varapickis") accompanied by an uncle, arrived at Ellis Island on December 9, 1922, on the USS America, to join their parents and younger sister Helen, born February 19, 1921, in Middleboro. The 1930 Federal Census found Anna Marie living in Bristol, Massachusetts, and working as a hospital maid under the name of Anna Warap.

Wigmore was inspired in part by the ideas of Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867 – 1939), who was influenced as a young man by the German Lebensreform movement, which saw civilization as corrupt and which sought to go "back to nature"; it embraced holistic medicine, nudism, various forms of spirituality, free love, exercise and other outdoors activity, and foods that it judged were more "natural". Bircher-Benner eventually adopted a vegetarian diet, but took that further and decided that raw food was what humans were really meant to eat; he was influenced by Charles Darwin's ideas that humans were just another kind of animal and Bircher-Benner noted that other animals do not cook their food. In 1904 Bircher-Benner opened a sanatorium in the mountains outside of Zurich called "Lebendinge Kraft" or "Vital Force," a technical term in the Lebensreform movement that referred especially to sunlight; he and others believed that this energy was more "concentrated" in plants than in meat, and was diminished by cooking. Patients in the clinic were fed raw foods, including meusli which was created there. While these ideas were dismissed by scientists and the medical profession of his day as quackery, they gained a following in some quarters. Wigmore was one of the first to popularize these ideas about raw food in the US.

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