Carol Laderman facts for kids

Carol Laderman (born October 25, 1932 – died July 6, 2010) was an amazing medical anthropologist. This means she studied how health, illness, and healing are connected to culture and society. She focused on pregnancy and childbirth practices, shamanism (a type of spiritual healing), and cultures in Southeast Asia. She spent a lot of time studying the Malay people in a rural area called Terengganu, Malaysia. Carol Laderman was also a well-known writer and a professor at City College.

Early Life and Education

Carol was born and grew up in Crown Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents were Philip and Sylvia Ciavati. She had an older sister named Irma, who became a painter and art professor.

Carol was very talented in music. She studied piano and learned about music theory. She married Gabriel Laderman when she was 20 years old. After her husband joined the US Army, Carol paused her studies at Brooklyn College to be with him near Fort Leonard Wood.

Later, Carol worked as a secretary and translator to help support her husband and their son, Raphael, who was born in 1958.

Return to College and a New Path

In 1969, Carol decided to go back to college at Hunter College. She first continued studying music. However, she took an anthropology class and found it so interesting that she changed her major.

While still a student, she researched how young Latina mothers in Spanish Harlem and the South Bronx felt about the American healthcare system. This research introduced her to the humoral system. This was an old idea about how the body works, but she saw it was still important in some cultures. This experience helped her later when she did research in Malaysia.

Carol explained how the humoral system worked with food. She said that "Scotch on the rocks would be considered very hot, while squash, even taken boiling from the stove, would be cold."

She graduated from Hunter College with honors in 1972. She then received a special fellowship that allowed her to study at Columbia University. While there, she wrote an important article about malaria.

Research in Malaysia

In 1975, Carol Laderman, her husband, and their younger son, Michael, moved to Malaysia. She spent two years in a village called Merchang to do research for her Ph.D. She learned from a local traditional healer, called a bomoh, and a village midwife.

Her research helped correct many misunderstandings about Malay culture. For example, some people thought that traditional food rules for pregnant women and new mothers caused them to be unhealthy. But Carol's careful studies showed that these women were actually well-nourished.

She also found that previous researchers had misunderstood some things. For instance, they thought Malay women limited how much they drank after childbirth. Carol showed that women avoided cold water because of the humoral system, but they still drank plenty of other fluids.

Carol wrote a book called "Wives and Midwives: Childbirth and Nutrition in Rural Malaysia." This book shared her important findings.

Her next book, "Taming the Wind of Desire," explored Malay spiritual healing ceremonies called Main Peteri. She translated these ceremonies and showed how they were a form of non-Western psychotherapy. She also explained traditional Malay personality types called "angin" (meaning "winds"), which she compared to Jungian archetypes.

Dr. Laderman returned to Malaysia for more research in 1982 and 2003.

Academic Career

Dr. Laderman had a long career teaching and writing. She worked at places like Yale University, Hunter College, Brooklyn College, Fordham University, and City College. She received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her important research papers and notes are kept at the Smithsonian Institution.