American psychiatrist (1917–2021)
Carola Blitzman Eisenberg (September 15, 1917 – March 11, 2021) was an Argentine-American psychiatrist who became the first woman to hold the position of Dean of Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1978 to 1990, she was the dean of student affairs at Harvard Medical School (HMS). She was a long-time lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS (formerly the Department of Social Medicine). She was also both a founding member of Physicians for Human Rights and an honorary psychiatrist with the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
After retiring, she was involved in human rights work through Physicians for Human Rights, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and elsewhere. She turned 100 in September 2017 and died in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in March 2021 at the age of 103.
Life and career.
Eisenberg was a native Argentine and the daughter of Teodora (née Kahan) and Bernardo Blitzman (Jewish emigrants from Ukraine and Russia, respectively). She was a co-founder of Physicians for Human Rights and latterly its vice president and chair of its Asylum Committee. Her dissertation, "A Histological Study of Tay–Sachs disease," was presented in 1944 for her medical degree at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. She was also a 1935 graduate of the School of Psychiatric Social Work in Hospicio De Las Mercedes (Hospice of the Virgin of Mercy) in Argentina. After receiving her medical degree and completing her psychiatric training at the Hospicio De Las Mercedes, she emigrated to the United States and became fellow in child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.
She was licensed to practice psychiatry in Maryland (1955) and Massachusetts (1971). Eisenberg served on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Medical School from 1958 to 1967 before becoming a staff psychiatrist at the Student Health Service of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1972 to 1978, she served as Dean of Students at MIT—first woman to occupy that position and the first to serve on the Academic Council, its highest academic governing authority. In 1978, after leaving MIT, she was appointed Dean for Student Affairs at Harvard Medical School, where she served until 1990. From 1990 to 1992, she was the director of the International Programs for Medical Students of the school.
Throughout her career, she consulted with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) (1979); Swarthmore College (1984); the Mental Health Division of the World Health Organization (1985); the Committee on Human Rights and Medical Practice of the American College of Physicians (1989–1993); the National Institutes of Health (1992, 1995–1998); Office of the Surgeon General, Department of Health and Human Services (1992); and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering (1992–1996).
She was a member of human rights missions to El Salvador, Chile, and Paraguay. She founded and served as Vice President of Physicians for Human Rights USA–headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts–and as President of the Examiners Club of Boston. She served on the Committee on Women in Science and Engineering of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, and was a member of the advisory committee to the Office of Research on Women's Health of the National Institutes of Health.
Eisenberg was active in both the Cambridge-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the Oral History Project of the Foundation for the History of Women in Medicine.
She was the widow of Leon Eisenberg, the Presley Professor of Social Medicine and professor of psychiatry "emeritus" in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of Harvard Medical School. As the widow of Manfred Guttmacher (brother of Alan Frank Guttmacher), she was also the mother of Laurence Guttmacher, a clinical professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and Alan Guttmacher, who succeeded Francis Sellers Collins (a past Director of the National Institutes of Health) as Acting Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. From 1 December 2009, she was Acting Director, then Director, of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
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