Working with collaborators, she wrote “The G Spot,” which became a cultural sensation and sold more than a million copies.Alice Kahn Ladas, a psychologist and psychotherapist whose best-selling 1982 book, “The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality,” created a tipping point for female sensual autonomy by introducing ways for women to experience greater sexual pleasure, died on July 29 at her home in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 102.Her daughter Robin Janis confirmed the death, adding that Dr. Ladas was still seeing patients at her home office the day before she died.Her book, written with the researchers Beverly Whipple and John Perry, examined the existence of the G-spot, a patch of erectile tissue that can be felt through the front wall of the vagina, behind the pubic bone. (The tissue is named for Ernst Gräfenberg, a German physician who was the first person to write about it in modern medical literature.) The book compared the G-spot to the male prostate: Each, when stimulated, can produce a sexual response similar to an orgasm.For their research, Dr. Whipple and Dr. Perry interviewed and tested some 400 women in Florida, all of whom all were able to locate their G-spots.“My role was to see the connection,” Dr. Ladas told The Santa Fe Reporter in 2010. “There was a vaginal orgasm, there was a clitoral orgasm, but they’re not exclusive.”The book, which has been translated into multiple languages and has sold more than one million copies, was revolutionary in helping women understand their sexual function, especially regarding female ejaculation.Still, the book proved controversial within the medical community, as women flocked to doctors wondering if they were experiencing ejaculation or urinary incontinence during intercourse. Some doctors questioned the depth of the authors’ research and whether the book was meant to be a medical tool or simply a “how to” handbook for women.“‘The G Spot’ reads like a scientific study, when it isn’t,” Dr. Martin Weisberg, then an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College, told The New York Times after the book was published.But Dr. Robert Francoeur, then a professor of human sexuality at Fairleigh Dickinson University, argued differently: “The professional jealousy is incredible in terms of sex educators, therapists and doctors. The nasty comments from professionals sound like they’re upset that they didn’t write the book.”In 2021, the National Institutes of Health published a review of 31 studies on the G spot and found that they “did systematically agree” on its existence.“Among the studies in which it was considered to exist, there was no agreement on its location, size, or nature,” the N.I.H. review said, concluding, “The existence of this structure remains unproved.”“The G Spot and Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality,” published in 1982, sold over a million copies.Holt/Metropolitan BooksAlice Kahn was born in Manhattan on May 30, 1921, to Rosalie Heil Kahn, an early supporter of the ethical culture movement, an effort to develop humanist codes of behavior, and Myron Daniel Kahn, a cotton merchant. Her parents divorced when she was 2, and she spent winters with her mother in Manhattan and extended summer vacations with her father in Montgomery, Ala.She attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Manhattan from kindergarten through high school and enrolled at Smith College in Massachusetts, graduating cum laude in 1943 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in political science and as a member of the honor society Phi Beta Kappa. She received a master’s in social work from Smith in 1946.While at Smith, Dr. Ladas met Eleanor Roosevelt while participating in a student leadership program at Campobello, the presidential summer retreat in New Brunswick. Inspired by the first lady’s feminism and activism, Dr. Ladas marched for civil rights in the South and in Washington.Dr. Ladas became a follower of the controversial Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Reich, developer of psychosexual theories centered on the orgasm, and joined his staff in New York in the early 1950s. In 1956, she helped Reich’s student Alexander Lowen found the Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis, with its focus on the bodily underpinnings of mental health.Intrigued by infants and breastfeeding, Dr. Ladas soon went to France to study the Lamaze method of childbirth, whereby women are encouraged to move around and use controlled breathing and relaxation as tools to begin labor. Returning to the United States, she became, in 1959, one of the first to teach Lamaze classes there.She received her doctorate in education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1970. Her dissertation on breastfeeding had initially been refused by faculty members until she persuaded the anthropologist Margaret Mead to sit on her dissertation committee. Dr. Ladas’s research was ultimately published in peer-reviewed journals in medicine and sociology.“That’s what I’m most proud of,” she told a Smith alumni magazine for a profile about her this year. “I believe it influenced — in the United States, at least — more women to breastfeed.”She married Harold Ladas, a psychology professor at Hunter College in New York, in 1963; he died in 1989. In addition to her daughter Robin, she is survived by another daughter, Pamela Ladas, and three grandchildren.In the 1970s, Dr. Ladas served on the boards of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, in Allentown, Pa., and the International Institute of Bioenergetic Analysis, based in Barcelona, Spain. A study she conducted with her husband about the effects of body psychotherapy on women’s sexuality led to her collaboration with Dr. Whipple and Dr. Perry.Dr. Ladas was a protégé of Adelle Davis, a nutritionist who taught her about organic foods and the importance of exercise. Dr. Ladas snorkeled and played tennis into her 90s and played piano even after she turned 100, her daughter said.Two nights before she died, she and a friend went to see the movie “Oppenheimer,” about the developer of the atomic bomb. It was “not history to her,” her daughter said, because “that was what she lived.”

As the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, she persevered to make care accessible to women and Black communities, regardless of their ability to pay.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.For more than 125 years, people trampled — unknowingly — across the grass where Rebecca Lee Crumpler rests in peace alongside her husband, Arthur, at Fairview Cemetery in Boston.Her burial plot was devoid of a gravestone even though she held a unique distinction: She was the first Black woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.It would take more than a century, from her death in 1895 until last year, for Crumpler to be given proper recognition by a group of Black historians and physicians. Were it not for them, she might still be languishing in anonymity.They had learned of Crumpler through the Rebecca Lee Society, a support group for Black women physicians in the 1980s, now believed to be defunct, that would occasionally roam the tree-lined grounds of the cemetery, near the edge of Mill Pond, in the Hyde Park neighborhood, looking for any evidence of her plot. People knew she had died in that neighborhood, and had consulted city records, but all they found was a brown patch of dirt where a gravestone should have been placed after interment.Since her death, Crumpler’s legacy has been muddled by incorrect information. Some mistakenly thought that she was the second Black woman to be awarded a medical school degree, after Rebecca Cole, but Cole graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania three years after Crumpler earned her degree from the New England Female Medical College (now part of the Boston University School of Medicine) in 1864.Several books and articles have featured photographs of a woman purported to be Crumpler, even though no pictures of her are known to exist. In “Gutsy Women,” a 2019 book by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton that celebrates historically significant women, there is a photo alongside an entry on Crumpler — but it is actually a photo of Mary Eliza Mahoney, the country’s first Black licensed nurse.After the Civil War, Crumpler worked for the medical division of the United States Bureau of Refugees, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency created by Congress during Reconstruction to provide services for emancipated slaves whom white physicians refused to see. But throughout her life, she was ignored, slighted or rendered insignificant, even invisible.Because of her race and gender, Crumpler was denied admitting privileges to local hospitals, had trouble getting prescriptions filled by pharmacists and was often ridiculed by administrators and fellow doctors. Still she persevered, with the knowledge that Black communities had an increased risk of illness because they were subjected to difficult living conditions and a lack of access to preventive care.“She focused on prevention, nutrition and attaining financial stability for one’s family, all relevant factors today,” Melody McCloud, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Atlanta, said by phone. “Dr. Crumpler was a pioneer who blazed a trail upon which many other Black female physicians have trod, and now tread.”McCloud, who urged Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia to declare March 30, 2019, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler Day — and who is trying to get a monument for Crumpler erected in Richmond, where she practiced medicine from 1865 to 1869 — was also a curator of an exhibition about Crumpler’s career at the Boston University School of Medicine.Rebecca Crumpler was born Rebecca Davis on Feb. 8, 1831, in Christiana, Del., to Matilda Weber and Absolum Davis. She explained her initial interest in healing in “A Book of Medical Discourses” (1883):“Having been reared by a kind aunt in Pennsylvania, whose usefulness with the sick was continually sought, I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to be in a position to relieve the sufferings of others.”After marrying Wyatt Lee, a Virginia laborer, in 1852, she relocated to Charlestown, Mass. She worked as a nurse there, assisting several doctors in the Boston area. They in turn supported her application to the New England Female Medical College, where she was awarded a state-funded scholarship.After two years, however, she took a leave of absence to care for her ailing husband, who died of tuberculosis in 1863. She returned seven months later to complete her final term but was nearly stymied after some faculty members expressed reservations regarding the amount of time it had taken her to complete her coursework.Several of the school’s patrons who were involved in the abolitionist movement offered their support. On March 1, 1864, the trustees voted to confer on her a “Doctress of Medicine” degree. She was 33.At the time, said Vanessa Northington Gamble, a physician, historian and professor at George Washington University, there were 54,543 physicians in the country; 270 of them were women — all white — and 180 were Black men.The New England Female Medical College would close in 1873 without ever conferring another medical degree on a Black woman.In 1865, Rebecca Lee married Arthur Crumpler, who had arrived in Boston three years earlier as a fugitive slave and later worked as a porter. The couple had one daughter, Lizzie Sinclair Crumpler, in 1870, but she is believed to have died young.The burial plot for Crumpler and her husband, Arthur, at Fairview Cemetery in Boston. Their graves were unmarked until a group of physicians and historians raised the money for their gravestones.Friends of the Hyde Park LibraryBy 1869, the Crumplers had moved back to Boston. They lived in the North Slope of Beacon Hill, then a predominantly Black community.“A cheerful home,” Crumpler wrote, “with a small tract of land in the country with wholesome food and water is worth more to preserve health and life than a house in a crowded city with luxuries and 20 rooms.”Her house, at 67 Joy Street, now has a plaque honoring her and is a stop on the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail.From that house, Crumpler treated mostly women and children, regardless of their ability to pay. Her book, dedicated to nurses and mothers, is seen as a precursor to “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” (1984), considered the prenatal bible for countless pregnant women. It is full of admonishments.“Children should not be asked if they like such and such things to eat, with the privilege of choosing that which will give them no nourishment to the blood,” Crumpler wrote. She also said, “Parents should hold onto their children, and children should stand by their parents, until the last strand of the silken cord is broken.”An article in 1894 in The Boston Globe described her book as “valuable” and Crumpler as “a very pleasant and intellectual woman” and “an indefatigable church worker.”Crumpler died of fibroid tumors on March 9, 1895. She was 64. Her husband died in 1910.In 2019 Vicki Gall, a history buff and president of the Friends of the Hyde Park Library, began a fund-raising campaign to have gravestones installed for them both. They were added at a ceremony on July 16, 2020, which Gall led.“I didn’t do this as a feel-good moment,” Gall said by phone. “It was a historical moment. She didn’t know the importance of what she was doing at the time, but we recognize it now.”There is no more trampled grass near the resting site of Rebecca Lee Crumpler. Instead, there is an awakening of her contributions to the medical community. As she wrote in “A Book of Medical Discourses”: “What we need today in every community is not a shrinking or flagging of womanly usefulness in this field of labor, but renewed and courageous readiness to do when and wherever duty calls.”