Dorothea Leighton (1908–1989)

Dorothea Cross Leighton was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts and studied chemistry and biology at Bryn Mawr College. After graduating in 1930, she got a job as a lab technician at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. She entered the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and earned her medical degree in 1936, specializing in psychiatry. The following year, she married a classmate, Alexander Leighton, with whom she had two children. Dr. Leighton studied anthropology at Creighton University and worked as a Special Research Physician for the U.S. Indian Service, later becoming Senior Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Cornell University. She was Professor of Mental Health at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at the Department of Epidemiology and Internal Health, University of California, San Francisco from 1974 until her death. Dr. Leighton did fieldwork with the Navajo people in Arizona and New Mexico, affiliated with the University of Chicago. She and her husband also did fieldwork in Alaska as part of an effort to incorporate anthropological methods into psychiatric practice. Their landmark book The Navajo Door (1944), is considered the earliest example of applied medical anthropology in the USA. Dr. Dorothea Leighton, now recognized as a founder of the field of medical anthropology, co-founded and served as the first president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She also co-authored two books with Clyde Kluckhohn, The Navajo (1946) and Children of the People (1947). Her two solo books were Character of Danger (1963) and People of the Middle Place: A Study of the Zuni Indians (1966).