Carol Laderman (October 25, 1932 – July 6, 2010) was a groundbreaking medical anthropologist, specializing in the study of pregnancy and childbirth practices, shamanism, and Southeast Asian cultures, particularly Malays in rural Terengganu, Malaysia. She was also a critically acclaimed writer and a longtime professor and lecturer who had just been re-elevated to Chairmanship of the Department of Anthropology at City College at the time of her death. Birth, early family life and education Carol was born and grew up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn with her father, Philip Ciavati (ne Cohen), mother, Sylvia (née Sugarman) and her older sister, Irma Cavat, who was later a painter and Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara. She was musically talented, and studied piano with Irma Wolpe and music theory and counterpoint with Stefan Wolpe. A fellow student of Stefan Wolpe, the composer Ezra Laderman, had a younger brother named Gabriel, who would eventually become Carol's husband. Shortly after she got married at the age of 20, Gabriel was drafted into the US Army, and Carol interrupted her education as a music major at Brooklyn College to join her husband near Fort Leonard Wood after he had completed basic training. Subsequently, Carol helped support Gabriel and her son, Raphael (b. 1958) by working as a legal secretary, social secretary and translator. Return to college and new focus on anthropology In 1969, Carol decided to go back to college, called the admissions office at Hunter College - like Brooklyn, part of the CUNY system - and reactivated her matriculation. She initially maintained her status as a music major, but when she took an anthropology course with Rena Gropper to fulfill a distributional requirement, she was so captivated that she changed her major. While she was still an undergraduate at Hunter, she did research under the auspices of Mt. Sinai Hospital on the attitudes young Latina mothers in Spanish Harlem and the South Bronx had toward the American health care system they were exposed to, and was thereby introduced to the humoral system as a fundamental aspect of a living belief system, rather than as just an ancient theory of Galen and others. This experience would prove to be important to her future research in Malaysia. She explained the practical applications of the humoral system as applied to foods in a New York Times article, for which she was interviewed: "Scotch on