Considered the founder of the field of medical anthropology, Dorothea Cross Leighton (1908-1989) is known for her work among Native American groups, including the Navajo of New Mexico and Inuit of Alaska. A Special Physician for US Office of Indian Affairs, she authored, in partnership with her husband, The Navaho Door: An Introduction to Navaho Life.

Commissioned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the book, published by Harvard University Press in 1944, recorded observations on Native American medical beliefs and practices to discover the means by which indigenous and Western ideas can be mutually modified for the benefit of native health. Written through the lens of those they interviewed, The Navaho Door set the stage for the new field of medical anthropology.

Described as a dynamic, humble, earth humanist and scientist, Leighton grew up in a well-educated, propertied family in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. Like her mother, founder of an early Montessori School, Leighton, valedictorian of her high school class, attended Bryn Mawr College. She received a complete scholarship to Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the only medical institution to admit women at the time.

Leighton held a number of academic positions including at Cornell University, the University of North Carolina, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley. She collaborated with well-known anthropologists including Clyde Kluckhohn and John Adair. She served as the first president of the Society for Medical Anthropology.

Leighton is quoted in the book, Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West as describing herself as a physician who became an accidental anthropologist and Southwesterner through her approach of learning from people rather than textbooks.