My husband, Roland Littlewood, who has died aged 78, was professor of psychiatry and anthropology at University College London from 1994 until 2012, and for more than 20 years the joint director of UCL’s Centre for Medical Anthropology, which explores how health, medicine and healing are influenced by cultural values and practices across different societies.
In the course of his research, Roland travelled to Trinidad to study the healing practices of Mother Earth (Jeanette Baptist) and the Earth People (a spiritual community), to Haiti to research voodoo and healing, and to the Lebanon to observe the Druze sect.
Born in Leicester, he was the younger son of Robert Littlewood, a lecturer in Spanish, and his Swiss wife, Trudi (nee Lehner), a lecturer in French and German. He spent formative years at Wyggeston 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 training as a nurse – we married there in 1975, with our wedding reception held in the Great Hall.
Roland then trained in psychiatry at Homerton hospital in Hackney. He would spend many hours with patients, wishing to understand people’s delusional ideas, how healing occurred within their understanding of their illness, how science and personal experiences might inform one another. With a fellow psychiatrist at Homerton, Maurice Lipsedge, he wrote Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry (1982), an examination of how prejudice and disadvantage can influence mental heath, which is now a standard text.
Roland was awarded a scholarship to study anthropology at Oxford, and, unusually, our daughter Leti (born in 1979) and I accompanied him on his field work to Trinidad, where I worked as a volunteer in a home for elderly people (L’Hospice) while Roland was in the north of the island in the remote settlement of Matelot. There he came across a group of people whose healer and master of nature was Mother Earth. Her followers scandalised some Trinidadians by walking around naked (though they wore jute sacks if they came into town).
Our family were lucky enough to stay with her and the Earth People, as she and I formed a bond through our young children. She was a charismatic figure, interested in ideas about healing, mental illness and respect for the Earth. She and Roland would talk long into the night. He drew on this experience for his 1987 thesis, published in 1993 as Pathology and Identity.
Roland enjoyed his time 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 as professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology until 2024.
He experienced several periods of illness, succumbing to metastatic pancreatic cancer, but with the help of UCL doctors was able to complete his book Between Anthropology and Psychiatry (with Simon Dein), which is due for publication in 2026.
He is survived by Leti and me, and his grandchildren, Mac, Etta and Daniel, and by his older brother, Antony.
