WEIDMAN, HAZEL

Hazel Marie Hitson Weidman was born on August 3, 1923 in Taft, CA. She worked in medical settings prior to receiving an undergraduate degree in social anthropology from Northwestern University in 1951, and for a short while thereafter. She pursued her graduate studies at Harvard's Radcliffe College from 1956 to 1959. Convinced that the anthropological perspective would be helpful in understanding medical structures and health care processes, Hazel Weidman enrolled in the graduate program in the Department of Social Relations, from which she obtained a Ph.D. in 1959. Based on her own field research, the dissertation was entitled "Family patterns and paranoidal personality structure in Boston and Burma."

From 1959 through 1964, Weidman worked for various federal, state and local medical service agencies. Her statewide study of the tuberculosis control system in Massachusetts, jointly conducted with her husband Dr. William H. Weidman, provided the data for new tuberculosis control legislation. She also prepared position papers for the U.S. Public Health Services on the topic of "Public Health Goals in Metropolitan Areas" which took her into the complexities of hospital administration and staff training programs for Fresno County Hospital. Under the sponsorship of the state of California, Weidman developed a community-wide program for the protection of battered children.

Prompted by a need to establish closer ties with anthropologist colleagues and to consolidate her thinking about anthropology in relation to medicine, Hazel Weidman moved to the academe in 1964. She first taught social anthropology at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA (1964-1965), then at the University of Alabama Medical Center (1965-1967). She was also an associate research fellow at the Social Science Research Institute of the University of Hawaii (1967-1968). In 1968, Weidman joined the faculty of the University of Miami where she held teaching positions at both the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine until her retirement in 1990.

At the University of Miami, Weidman planned a community mental health program geared to the needs of the inner-city population of Miami. The goal of the program was to train the participants in attaining a transcultural perspective, thus becoming "culture brokers" in the delivery of delivery of health care to patients coming from multi-ethnic backgrounds. Similar programs led to the creation in 1981 of the Office of Transcultural Education and Research (O.T.E.R.), a resource center for people and organizations concerned about cultural beliefs and behaviors that might influence the management and outcome of health care to patients from a variety of cultural traditions.

Weidman has had a lasting impact on the centralization of medical anthropology as a sub-discipline in its own right, and her work in the field contributed significantly to the recognition of the importance of the anthropological perspective in medicine and medical care.

Sources: "Profile of an anthropologist" Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association 20 (10) Dec 1979. Biographical listings (Weidman Papers, 7.17).

From the guide to the Weidman, Hazel Marie Hitson, (1923--) Papers, 1955-1991, n.d., (Peabody Museum Archives)