Gay Becker 関連ニュース

[http://nurseweb.ucsf.edu/public/becker-obit.htm:title=Gay Becker
Obituary]

Gay Becker, a pioneering medical anthropologist at UCSF Medical Center who championed people on the fringes of society, has died at the age of 63. She became ill while traveling in India and Nepal, two of her favorite places.
"I knew her for 30 years," said Sharon Kaufman, a colleague and friend. "She was a person of great integrity and commitment who was very dedicated to a life of enabling the disadvantaged and the stigmatized to speak."
On Jan. 7, Professor Becker died of respiratory and circulatory system failure in a Bangkok hospital, where she had spent eight weeks after developing a pulmonary embolism while trekking in Nepal and then contracting pneumonia. A service will be held on Saturday.
"She was a great uphill walker," said her husband, Roger Van Craeynest. "She didn't get to the top of the mountain quite as fast as the rest of us, but she always got to the top."
Professor Becker was born and raised in San Francisco. She and her husband had recently moved to San Rafael after decades in San Anselmo.
A widely honored teacher and researcher, Professor Becker focused much of her work in two areas: aging and chronic illness, and infertility and reproductive health.
"She looked at both ends of the life cycle," said Kaufman, a UCSF professor of medical anthropology.
She said Professor Becker was committed to merging research with social justice. She studied such things as the effects of immigration and globalization on the elderly, trauma among refugees, the health of uninsured minorities and the pain of childless couples.
"Gay was really in the first wave of medical anthropologists to see the problems of health and medicine intimately tied to culture, and not some separate entity," Kaufman said.
Van Craeynest said his wife learned about chronic illness at an early age because she was a lifelong asthmatic.
"She was very private about it," he said. "She didn't want people to think she was overcompensating."
Her parents divorced when she was very young, at a time when failed marriages were not common, and she was raised by her grandparents.
"She was always interested in stigma," Van Craeynest said. "It probably came from growing up poor in the Marina."
He said their unsuccessful attempts to have a child led to Professor Becker's infertility studies.
"Her own experiences with things informed her research but did not shape the outcome," he said. "They helped her form questions. Her interest was always in the people she was looking at and how they saw the world."
He said his relationship with Professor Becker started in 1970.
"We met at S.F. State in an anthropology class, 'The Cultures of Polynesia,' an ethnic group neither of us had any interest in," recalled Van Craeynest. "We've been together ever since. I would have loved to spend another 20 years with my wife. I have not even started the grieving process."
For comfort, he is about to reread one of his wife's four books: "Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World."
He and Professor Becker spent a great deal of time with their eight nieces and nephews. The medical anthropologist helped shape their lives, just as she did with the countless students she taught at UCSF for more than a quarter-century.
"My aunt was always educating us and showing us new things and expanding our world," said Maximilian Van Craeynest. "When I was about 10, she took me to Point Reyes and showed me all the tidal pools and the crustaceans and the shell life. She also inspired a love and passion for the eastern Sierra, where I now reside."
His aunt was a full professor at UCSF but not a tenured one. She was in the rare position of being self-sufficient, winning grants -- mainly from the National Institutes of Health -- to fund her work for 25 years. Shortly before her death, Professor Becker learned she'd gotten the money to study how people's health had been affected by their displacement after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
"She was always upbeat, incredibly considerate, absolutely engaged with other people," Kaufman said. "She was one of the most supportive individuals on the face of the Earth. She was sometimes funny and wry, and persuasive when necessary."
Van Craeynest said his wife was "one of these very genuine people," nonjudgmental to a fault, who never treated people as functionaries.
The trip that led to her death began on Oct. 28. Professor Becker and Van Craeynest trekked more than 40 miles in eight days to a ridge from which they saw sunrise over Mount Everest.
"She was a person who was told, 'You can't do this, and you can't do that. You can't climb mountains.' We climbed mountains during our 37 years together, and she climbed mountains metaphorically," Van Craeynest said.
The day after Professor Becker died, a Buddhist funeral was held and some of her ashes were scattered in Thailand. The rest will go to the places she loved best: the Sierra Nevada, Arizona desert, San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais.
Professor Becker is survived by her husband and a sister, Pamela Jones of Sacramento.
A service will be held at 4 p.m. Saturday at the Marin Art and Garden Center in Ross. Another memorial will take place March 2, also at 4 p.m., in the Lange Room of the UCSF Library, 530 Parnassus Ave.
Contributions can be made to the UCSF Foundation/Becker Fund and sent to: Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, c/o Gay Becker Memorial Fund in Medical Anthropology, University of California San Francisco, 3333 California St., Suite 485, San Francisco, CA 94118.
Source:www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/26/BAGO2NPIB71.DTL&hw=becker&sn=001&sc=1000