San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cofounder of Physicians for Human Rights
Dr. Carola Eisenberg, who broke gender barriers as a dean at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard Medical School and helped found Physicians for Human Rights, whose campaign against antipersonnel land mines led to a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, died March 11 in Lincoln, Mass. She was 103.
Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by her son Alan Guttmacher.
Eisenberg, a psychiatrist, was born with a social conscience. She was descended from Jewish socialist refugees from czarist Russia and was a native of Argentina, where by her account she was inspired to pursue psychiatry after visiting a mental hospital as a teenager with her father, one of a series of Sunday tours arranged by a socialist newspaper. She was shocked to see hundreds of patients chained to their beds.
She went on to blaze a trail in the United States in both human rights advocacy and academia while becoming an outspoken proponent of parity for women in medicine.
Eisenberg served as MIT’s dean of student affairs from 1972 to 1978, the first woman to hold that position; she was also the first woman to be named to MIT’s Academic Council. From 1978 to 1990, she was dean of student affairs at Harvard Medical School, again the first woman to be named to that office.
Her work on behalf of human rights accelerated in the 1980s, when she was invited to visit El Salvador, Chile and Paraguay to document the rights abuses being committed by authoritarian governments there as they sought to wipe out leftist guerrillas. “I never believed human beings could do such things to other human beings,” she later said.
Eisenberg had a personal connection to such abuses. During Argentina’s “dirty war,” the brutally repressive period beginning in the 1970s, her brotherinlaw’s nephew and his wife were among those who were “disappeared” — killed by groups sponsored by the country’s military dictatorship.
In 1986, she joined a group of other doctors in establishing Physicians for Human Rights, to call attention to such abuses and aid the victims.
Caroline Blitzman was born Sept. 15, 1917, in Buenos Aires, the second of three daughters. Her father, Bernardo Blitzman, had emigrated to Argentina from Russia as a baby; her mother, Teodora (Kahn) Blitzman, was from Ukraine. Caroline grew up across the street from a slaughterhouse, where her father was an executive dealing in hides.
After graduating from high school, she was trained as a psychiatric social worker in Buenos
Aires at the Hospicio de las Mercedes (now the Municipal Hospital of José Tiburcio Borda) before deciding to pursue a medical career.
“I had to go into medicine to be able to do more than just give tickets at Christmastime for the families to have a turkey,” she said in 2008 in an interview with the Foundation for the History of Women in Medicine.
She graduated from the University of Buenos Aires with a medical degree in 1944.
Prevented by visa complications from accepting a fellowship in child psychiatry in Britain with Dr. Anna Freud, the youngest child of Sigmund, Eisenberg studied instead at Johns Hopkins University under the tutelage of Dr. Leo Kanner, who had recently coined the term autism. She worked with him at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
She then joined the medical school faculty at Johns Hopkins and practiced psychiatry until 1968, when she became a staff psychiatrist with the student health services at
MIT.
Eisenberg changed her first name to Carola after she moved to the United States in 1945. She became a naturalized American citizen in 1949.
She married Dr. Manfred Guttmacher, a forensic psychiatrist, in 1946; he died in 1966. In 1967, she married Leon Eisenberg, an autism research pioneer; he died in 2009.
In addition to her son Alan, retired director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (which is part of the National Institutes of Health) in Rockville, Md., Eisenberg is survived by another son, Laurence Guttmacher, a professor of clinical psychiatry and clinical medical humanities at the University of Rochester School of Medicine; stepchildren, Mark and Kathy Eisenberg; two grandchildren; eight stepgrandchildren; and five stepgreatgrandchildren.