Gay Becker
By Sharon R. Kaufman
Gay Becker, PhD, a medical anthropologist at UCSF, died Jan. 7, 2007, in Bangkok, following an eight-week illness that began while she and her husband were traveling in India. She was 63.
Her untimely death in the prime of her distinguished and socially committed career left her family, friends, colleagues and students with a deep sense of loss and profound sadness.
A memorial will take place on Friday, March 2, at 4 p.m. in the Lange Room of the UCSF library, 530 Parnassus Ave.
Through her rigorous, astute research and clear, prolific publications to multiple audiences, Becker was an unswerving champion of the overlooked, the disadvantaged, the stigmatized, the unlucky and the pained.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Becker received her BA degree in Anthropology at San Francisco State University in 1972 and her PhD in Medical Anthropology in the joint UCSF UC Berkeley Medical Anthropology Program in 1978. Mentored by Margaret Clark, PhD, George Foster, PhD, and Joan Ablon, PhD, she was among the first wave of doctoral students trained specifically in medical anthropology.
Becker's early interest in how stigma, disability and chronic illness are culturally mediated led to her pioneering doctoral research on the culture of deafness, published as Growing Old in Silence (1980). She was one of the first anthropologists to seriously engage illness and disability as cultural phenomena that could be investigated both through narrative and phenomenological theory and through ethnographic work in communities and medical settings.
Her work on chronic illness included studies of stroke and asthma, and it led to one of the primary research foci of her career: the multiple and often resilient ways in which individuals live with health conditions that create unforeseen paths in the course of their lives. The richness of people's lives mattered most to her.
Role Model
After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in 1978-1979, Becker joined the faculty at UCSF. With appointments in the Institute for Health & Aging, the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, Becker taught in the Medical Anthropology Program, the Medical Sociology Program, the UCSF School of Nursing and the UCSF School of Medicine for 25 years while simultaneously achieving a productive research career.
Unusual for an anthropologist in the 1980s and 1990s, Becker had a central role in teaching pre- and postdoctoral students in gerontology and geriatric medicine. Beloved by several generations of students for her personal warmth and support, her ethnographic work and accessible publications, and her honest, straightforward style of communication, she was one of the most admired and sought-after advisers throughout UCSF.
In 1995, Becker won the Distinction in Teaching Award from the Academic Senate at UCSF. She trained many of the medical anthropologists and medical sociologists working at home and abroad today. She also nurtured and empowered many others - colleagues, research staff, informants, patients and physicians.
Research Interests
Becker was among the very small coterie of anthropologists who received consistent funding over a 25-year period for ethnographic research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and two agencies supported her research: the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She also served the NIH as a member of a study section and as a consultant on various projects. Gay was always available to mentor students and postdoctoral fellows in the art of NIH grant-writing.
Becker's engagement with social issues was channeled into two broad areas of research. The first, encompassing aging, ethnicity, chronic illness and, most recently, structural inequality and the uninsured, stressed the relationships among illness, ethnicity, poverty and life course disruption, and she wrote widely on the chronic illness experience among ethnic minorities, the effects of immigration and globalization on the elderly, displacement, memory, trauma and health status among refugees, the health of the uninsured, and social factors that prevent the creation of universal health insurance.
Becker earned the highly prestigious Merit Award from the National Institute on Aging for her work on ethnicity and aging in a 10-year study, "Cultural Responses to Illness in the Minority Aged." Her second area of research (in collaboration with Robert Nachtigall, MD) explored the experiences of infertility, donor insemination, and marketing and consuming the new reproductive technologies. Aware of the profound feelings of pain and grief among many childless couples, she wrote Healing the Infertile Family (1990, new edition 1997), making her findings available to a wide public. At the time of her death, Becker had four active NIH projects and a book manuscript in progress titled "Living Poor in the Land of Plenty: Illness, Disruption, and Poverty in Four Ethnic Groups."
Honors and Awards
During the last decade of her life, Becker's work was recognized through a multitude of honors and awards. Her publications in the medical literature were lauded for their insights about cultural diversity and relevance to the practice of medicine.
Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World (1998) was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and received international acclaim.
The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies (2000) won the Robert Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.
In the months before her illness, she gave two lectures that stand out for their impact on broad publics: the 2006 M. Margaret Clark Memorial Lecture in Anthropology/ Medical Grand Rounds at UCSF, "Deadly Inequality: Uninsured Minorities and Critical Illness," and a symposium lecture at the NIH, "Ethnographic and Qualitative Approaches to the Role of Culture in Disparities Research."
Becker served the Society of Medical Anthropology with a great deal of energy, enthusiasm and competence. She was the editor of the
Medical Anthropology Quarterly from 1994 to1998.
Becker was committed to merging research with social justice; she was a model scholar. She was a superb mediator and was modest about her own accomplishments. She was a person of integrity and generosity of spirit. Becker had a great deal of wisdom and ethical clarity about academic affairs and the conduct of life. Her own experience with chronic illness gave her special insights. She lived fully, hiking the Grand Canyon rim to rim, and she died shortly after completing a 70-kilometer trek in Nepal, having seen Mt. Everest.
She is survived by her husband and life partner of many years, Roger Van Craeynest.
In Becker's memory, contributions may be made to the Gay Becker Memorial Fund in Medical Anthropology, UCSF. Please make checks payable to the UCSF Foundation/Becker Fund and send to: The Gay Becker Fund, Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, UCSF, 3333 California St., Suite 485, San Francisco, CA 94118.
Sharon Kaufman is a UCSF professor of medical anthropology.
