the rocks[...]would be considered very hot, while squash, even taken boiling from the stove, would be cold." Ms. Laderman graduated from Hunter College with honors in 1972 and was shortly thereafter awarded a Danforth Foundation fellowship, which enabled her to do graduate work at Columbia University. While she was a masters-level student at Columbia, she wrote "Malaria and progress: Some historical and ecological considerations" - which is still a much-cited article today. Malaysia In 1975, Ms. Laderman, her husband and her younger son, Michael (b. 1965), went to Malaysia, where she would do doctoral research for the following two years in the coastal village of Merchang, Terengganu, on the East Coast of the Malay Peninsula. She was apprenticed to a locally-famous bomoh and a traditional village midwife. The doctoral dissertation that resulted from her research, "Conceptions and Preconceptions: Childbirth and Nutrition in Rural Malaysia" - for which she received a Ph.D. with distinction - and the subsequent book, "Wives and Midwives: Childbirth and Nutrition in Rural Malaysia, helped correct many assumptions previously made by anthropologists and other writers about Malay culture. For example, through rigorous dietary analysis and blood testing, she was able to demonstrate that traditional dietary restrictions practiced by some Malay women during pregnancy and for 40 days after childbirth were not causing malnutrition, as had previously been claimed. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which her methodical work upended previous conventional wisdom about Malay culture among the anthropological community. To take just one example, on p. 185 of "Wives and Midwives," Laderman states that previous authorities "agree[d]...that fluids are restricted during the postpartum period," yet of 131 women she questioned about nursing their babies, 103 had nursed without bottle supplements for at least one year. She explains that previous researchers had erred by misunderstanding a prohibition on drinking cold water (primarily due to humoral considerations of cold water being possibly dangerously humorally "cooling" to the baby) as constituting a limitation on overall fluid intake, and also by overrelying on "sayur" as "the [generic] word for vegetables in standard Malay," as opposed to the specific local meaning of "vegetables [cooked] with coconut cream, chilis, and fish." Asking Malays from Terengganu and Kelantan how much "sayur" they eat would have produced misleading answers, if the questioner was trying to discover how often they ate vegetables in any form. A subsequent book, "Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology,