User talk:MaynardClark/NormanAScotch

Norman A. Scotch

In trying to develop a draft page for Norman A. Scotch, all I have is from audio archives in an oral history project which was defunded after reduced endowment service in the History Department of the University of Nevada, Reno. I do not know whether or not he is still alive (even after extensive inquiry), but here are the NOTES from those three CDs from the oral history program:

Tape 1

Norman Scotch was born in Boston in 1928. His mother was from Lithuania and his father from Russia. He had one brother and one sister. He went to art school at night during high school and has done painting, photography, and sculpting, as well as acting. He was the youngest in his class, failed a lot of his classes in high school, and adopted the role of class clown. His parents were not big on education, but his brother brought books into the home, and Scotch read the encyclopedia. Since retirement he has written screenplays. He graduated from high school in 1946 and went into the army, where he was an occupational counselor at the separation center for soldiers leaving the army after World War II. He had the GI Bill for college and went to Boston University and earned a B.A. in psychology and a master's in sociology. He then earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at Northwestern, where he lived in Anthro House and took cello lessons. He got a teaching job at Washington State. He wanted to do fieldwork in Africa and study hypertension among the Zulus but was turned down for a grant by the Ford Foundation. He was then sponsored by Jerry Stamler from the medical school at Northwestern, who was interested in diet and hypertension in Africans. Scotch received a grant from the U.S. Public Health Service and wrote what he considers to be the first serious paper on medical anthropology. He also discusses coining the word "ethnomedicine." Before going to Africa, Scotch went to study the Washoe Indians in Nevada to gain some fieldwork experience.

Tape 2

While at Northwestern University, Scotch taught Sunday School in Glencoe, Illinois, where the rabbi was Edgar Siskin, who had done fieldwork with the Washoe in the late 1930s. Scotch remembers Dresslerville as being like a junkyard with wrecked cars behind every house. He met Hank Pete, Bill Jacobsen, and the James family. Bertha Holbrook was his paid informant at fifty cents an hour, and Scotch took everyone's blood pressure for an epidemiology study. His wife, Frieda, worked with him. They lived in a trailer at the Stewart Indian School. Frieda also did surveys on relocation for the B.I.A. (the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an American government agency) After his fieldwork in Africa, Scotch published thirty papers on Zulu hypertension. At Washington State, Scotch taught anthropology and sociology and wrote his thesis. His hypothesis for the study among the Washoe concerned blood pressure as it relates to social tensions and integration into white society. His study among the Zulu had much better methodology. He was on the cutting edge of cross-cultural studies of hypertension. Scotch received the Russell Sage Fellowship to get a masters in public health at Harvard School of Public Health.

Tape 3

Scotch was offered a job at Harvard, became an assistant professor in public health, and lectured in anthropology. He was thrilled to be on the faculty at Harvard, where he had been turned down twice as a student. A study he did at Harvard resulted in the book Social Stress. At the same time, he taught night courses in anthropology and sociology at Brandeis University and took a course in painting. He then went to Baltimore to teach at Johns Hopkins as associate professor. With Sol Levine, he established a new department there. Scotch received a grant with the Framingham Heart Study to do longitudinal studies on stress and heart disease. Scotch achieved tenure and the rank of full professor at age thirty-eight. He was visiting professor at the University of California at San Diego and worked at the Salk Institute doing studies on alcoholism. He took a position in the medical school at Boston University in 1972 and started a new department, the School of Public Health, where he enjoyed being the administrator. He retired in 1992 but still works one day a week in a community substance-abuse program, Join Together, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He discusses his view of anthropologists then and now.

The sources of the information are:

• Anita Ernst Watson Ph.D., Shared History Coordinator, Department of History, University of Nevada, Reno.
• Alicia Barber, Ph.D., mobile 775.771.3975, aliciambarber@gmail.com, www.aliciambarber.com
• University of Nevada, Oral History Program, Mail Stop 0324, Reno, NV 89557-0324, 775/784-6932, Fax: 775/784-1365

There also are THREE (3) PDFs of a book on 'The Washoe Ethnographers' about the world and work of Norman A. Scotch and his colleagues in Nevada.

The SECTION or CHAPTER on Norm Scotch [Norman A. Scotch] is pages 359-394. There is brief material from him on pages 112, 235, and 253. Scotch, Frieda, 359, 362, 364, 367, 369-370, 372-373, 377-382, 386-387, 389, 392, 394 Scotch, Norman, 112, 235, 253, 359-394 Scotch, Richard, 362, 366 Scotch, Ruth, 367 Scotch, Sam, 359, 361, 364, 366 Scotch, Sarah, 359, 361, 364, 384 Scotch, Steven, 386

I don't know what else to do with this information, although I have extensive correspondence with UNLVR personnel who each had limited involvement with the project or the involved programs and persons. The Oral History Archive was transferred to the Special Collections Department of the University of Nevada, Reno Library, and staffing changes followed budget cuts after economic shrinkage in 2008. Their Oral History Program was pretty much shut down as of the end of Spring 2013 term, due to the University’s budget crisis.

Archivists were able to learn from those who were involved that the Norman A. Scotch oral history was not yet finished at the time of the closure, so no funding remains or could be found. Perhaps Boston University School of Public Health could fund such a project or could request that copies of those materials be sent to them.

I shared this text on the talk page of the BUSPH article. MaynardClark (talk) 16:40, 20 June 2014 (UTC)