Dorothea Leighton

Dorothea Cross Leighton (September 2, 1908 – August 15, 1989) was an American social psychiatrist and a founder of the field of medical anthropology. Leighton held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina and she was the founding president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She and her husband, Alexander Leighton, wrote The Navajo Door, which has been described as the first written work in applied medical anthropology.

Early life and education Born Dorothea Cross in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, on September 2, 1908, she attended Bryn Mawr College, where she studied chemistry and biology. She graduated in 1930, and went to work at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a technician. After two years, she matriculated at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and graduated with her MD in 1936. She married a classmate, Alexander Leighton, in 1937 (she did not receive an appointment at Johns Hopkins; he did) and had two children, then divorced in 1965.

She was a professor of child development and family relations at Cornell University from 1949 to 1952. While at Cornell, she studied psychiatry in a rural context, via fieldwork in Stirling County, Nova Scotia. Around 1960, she traveled to Nigeria to do similar fieldwork with Yoruba people, and also did similar studies in Sweden. Leighton then became a professor of public health and anthropology at the University of North Carolina, a position she held from 1965 to 1974, when she retired. She moved to Fresno, California, and continued to be somewhat involved in academia. In 1977, she was a lecturer at the University of California, San Francisco, and from 1981 to 1982 she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, her last academic position before her death on August 15, 1989.