Pioneering Child Psychiatrist Who Broke Racial Barriers Dies

After a long and distinguished career that advanced the field of child psychiatry, Beatrix Hamburg, M.D., died April 15 in Washington, D.C. She was 94 years old.

Hamburg was the first African American to attend Vassar College and the first African‑American woman to attend Yale Medical School. She held professorships at Stanford, Harvard, Mount Sinai, and—most recently—at Weill Cornell Medical College. She served as executive director of the President’s Commission on Mental Health under President Jimmy Carter and later as president of the William T. Grant Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to research on children’s issues. She was also a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Hamburg was known as a trailblazer in child and adolescent psychiatry and advanced the concept of adolescent peer counseling. In an obituary in the Washington Post, Virginia Anthony, the former executive director of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, was quoted as saying, “She taught high school kids to essentially say to their friends, ‘I’m worried about you … I’m concerned. I miss the old you,’ and so she implemented that at Stanford, and then it took hold in California and moved across the country and over to Europe. It was a very significant preventative concept.”

She is survived by her husband, David Hamburg, M.D., two children, and three grandchildren. Hamburg and her husband, who was president of the Institute of Medicine from 1975 to 1980, studied the biology of stress—physical, mental, and situational—and how people cope. In 2004 they co-wrote a book, Learning to Live Together: Preventing Hatred and Violence in Child and Adolescent Development. In 2007 the couple received the 2007 Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Award in Mental Health from the Institute of Medicine for their achievements in medicine and public service. In 2015, the couple received the Pardes Humanitarian Prize in Mental Health from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

Their daughter, Margaret Hamburg, M.D., is a physician who also works in public health. She was commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under the Obama administration and is now president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In an interview published on its website, the daughter described her parents as “unusually big thinkers who were committed to the world of service and using knowledge to improve the condition of others.” ■