Carola B. Eisenberg

After retiring, she was involved in human rights work through Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), and elsewhere. She turned 100 in September 2017 and died in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in March 2021 at the age of 103.

She was the widow of Leon Eisenberg, Presley Professor of Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of the Harvard Medical School of Boston. As the widow of the late Manfred Guttmacher (brother of Alan Frank Guttmacher), she was also the mother of Laurence B. Guttmacher, MD, who is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities and also Advisory Dean, University of Rochester School of Medicine (URMC), and Alan Edward Guttmacher, MD, who succeeded Dr. Francis Sellers Collins (now National Institutes of Health Director) as Acting Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at NIH, but from Dec. 1, 2009, she was Acting Director, then Director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), also at NIH.

Throughout her career, she consulted with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) (1979), Swarthmore College (1984), Mental Health Division of the World Health Organization (1985), Committee on Human Rights and Medical Practice, American College of Physicians (1989–1993), National Institutes of Health (1992), Office of the Surgeon General, Department of Health and Human Services (1992), National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering (1992–1996), and the National Institutes of Health (1995–1998).

She was licensed to practice medicine (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. From 1972 to 1978, she served as Dean of Students at MIT, the 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 for 12 years (1978–1990). From 1990 to 1992, she was Director of the International Programs for Medical Students at HMS.

Eisenberg was a native Argentine, the daughter of Teodora (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 the Chair of its Asylum Committee. Her dissertation on "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), Argentina. After receiving her medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires and taking her psychiatric training at the Hospicio De Las Mercedes, she emigrated to the U.S. and became Fellow in Child Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, Maryland.

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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1978 to 1990, she was the Dean of Student Affairs at Harvard Medical School (HMS). She has for a long time been Lecturer in the newly renamed 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, a longstanding position there.