The academic world mourns the loss of Professor Roland Littlewood, a seminal figure who bridged the disciplines of psychiatry and anthropology. He passed away at the age of 78 after a battle with metastatic pancreatic cancer.
A Life Dedicated to Understanding Culture and Healing
Born in Leicester, Roland Littlewood was the younger son of Robert, a Spanish lecturer, and Trudi, who taught French and German. His academic journey began at Wyggeston Grammar School before he pursued medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London. It was there, in 1969, that he met his future wife, a nursing student. The couple married in 1975 at Barts, celebrating their reception in the hospital's historic Great Hall.
After qualifying as a doctor, he trained in psychiatry at Homerton Hospital in Hackney. He was deeply committed to understanding his patients' worlds, spending extensive time exploring how personal delusions formed and how healing was perceived within the context of their illnesses. This early work laid the foundation for his lifelong interest in the intersection of personal experience and scientific knowledge.
Groundbreaking Work in Medical Anthropology
In 1982, alongside fellow psychiatrist Maurice Lipsedge, he co-authored the influential text Aliens and Alienists: Ethnic Minorities and Psychiatry. The book, now a standard academic work, critically examined how prejudice and social disadvantage profoundly affect mental health diagnoses and treatment.
His passion for cultural context led him to Oxford on a scholarship to study anthropology. This academic shift took his young family on extraordinary fieldwork expeditions. In the late 1970s and 80s, he conducted research in Trinidad, Haiti, and Lebanon. His most notable fieldwork was in the remote northern Trinidad settlement of Matelot, where he lived with and studied the Earth People, a spiritual community led by the charismatic healer known as Mother Earth (Jeanette Baptist).
This immersive research formed the basis of his 1993 book Pathology and Identity, originally his 1987 doctoral thesis. It explored how identity and illness are constructed within specific cultural and religious frameworks.
A Legacy of Leadership and Scholarship
Professor Littlewood's academic career was centred at University College London, where he served as Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology from 1994 until his retirement in 2012. For over two decades, he was joint director of UCL's Centre for Medical Anthropology, a hub for exploring how cultural values shape health and healing practices globally.
He also served as President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1994 to 1997 and was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2007. Even after retirement, he remained active as a professor emeritus in UCL's Department of Anthropology until 2024.
Despite his illness, he persevered to complete his final academic work. With the support of UCL doctors, he finished the manuscript for Between Anthropology and Psychiatry, co-authored with Simon Dein, which is scheduled for publication in 2026.
He is survived by his wife, their daughter Leti (born in 1979), three grandchildren—Mac, Etta, and Daniel—and his older brother, Antony.
