Valentina Pavlovna Wasson

Valentina Pavlovna Wasson (1901 to 1958) was a Russian-American pediatrician, ethnomycologist and author. Born in Moscow, she came to the United States with her family during the Russian Revolution, earned a medical degree at London University in 1927 and worked as a pediatrician, publishing research on sinusitis and rheumatic fever in children. With her husband R. Gordon Wasson she studied the religious and cultural uses of mushrooms, and from 1953 the couple travelled to the Mazatec village of Huautla in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her 1957 magazine account of the experience, and the book Mushrooms Russia and History, helped bring psychoactive mushrooms to a wide American audience, and she suggested they might serve as a psychotherapeutic tool. She died of cancer on 31 December 1958.