In this, the first volume of the 41st year of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, we honor Shirley Lindenbaum in each of our volume’s numbers. Professor Lindenbaum is best known for her work on Kuru sorcery (Lindenbaum 1975, 1979, 2013). This work, however, developed into work on a new disease entity, the prion, which caused Kuru. Her ethnographic work provided Gadjusek with clues leading to the identification of the prion causative agent. Her work expanded to include related prion disease and its understanding in the UK and how such outbreaks were handled in policy and practice (medical and political) (2001, 2004, 2015). Her work also lead her to consider Biomedicine itself (Lindenbaum and Lock 1993). She has also done research on cholera in East Pakistan and AIDS in NewYork City (Lindenbaum and Herdt 1992).

We are pleased to honor Professor Lindenbaum who is currently Professor Emerita of the Graduate Center, City University of New York. As is our usual procedure, Dr. Lindenbaum will be honored with an overview of her academic career and will include a full bibliography of her work to appear in our December issue.