My husband, Roland Littlewood, who has died aged 78, was professor of psychiatry and anthropology at University College London from 1994 to 2012 and was co-director of the UCL Medical Center for more than 20 years. Anthropologywhich explores how health, medicine, and healing are influenced by the cultural values ​​and practices of different societies.
As part of his research, Roland traveled to Trinidad to study the healing practices of Mother Earth (Jeanette Baptiste). and People of the Earth (spiritual community) to Haiti for voodoo research and healing, and to Lebanon to observe the Druze sect.
He was born in Leicester, the youngest son of Robert Littlewood, a Spanish teacher, and his Swiss wife Trudi (née Lehner), a French and German teacher. He spent his formative years at Wiggeston Grammar School in Leicester, then trained as a doctor at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London. I met Roland in 1969 at a party at Barts, where I was studying to be a nurse. We got married there in 1975 and had our wedding reception in the Great Hall.
Roland then trained in psychiatry at Homerton Hospital in Hackney. He spent many hours with patients, wanting to understand people's delusions, how healing occurred within their understanding of their illness, and how science and personal experience could inform each other. With fellow Homerton psychiatrist Maurice Lipsedge, he wrote Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry (1982), a study of how prejudice and disadvantage can affect mental health, which is now a standard text.
Roland received a scholarship to study anthropology at Oxford and, unusually, our daughter Leti (born 1979) and I accompanied him on fieldwork to Trinidad, where I volunteered at a nursing home (L'Hospice) while Roland was in the north of the island, in the remote village of Matelot. There he met a group of people whose healer and mistress of nature was Mother Earth. Her followers outraged some Trinidadians by walking around naked (although they wore gunny bags if they came into town).
Our family was lucky enough to stay with her and the Earthlings as we were connected to her by our young children. She was a charismatic figure interested in ideas of healing, mental illness and respect for the Earth. She and Roland could talk late into the night. He used this experience in his 1987 dissertation, published in 1993 as Pathology and Identity.
Roland enjoyed his tenure as President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1994 to 1997, as a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 2007, and at UCL, where he continued to be Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology until 2024.
He suffered several periods of illness, succumbing to metastatic pancreatic cancer, but with the help of UCL doctors he was able to complete his book Between Anthropology and Psychiatry (with Simon Dane), due to be published in 2026.
He is survived by Leti and I, his grandchildren Mac, Etta and Daniel, and his older brother Anthony.
