Viola Wertheim Bernard, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, child welfare advocate, and pioneer in the field of community psychiatry, was born in 1907 in New York City, the youngest child of Jacob Wertheim and his second wife, Emma Stern. Bernard’s father, the owner of the United Cigar Company and one of the founders of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, was a wealthy man who at his death in 1920 left his family in comfortable circumstances.

Bernard was educated at the Robert Louis Stevenson and Ethical Culture Schools in New York City. She did undergraduate work at Smith, Barnard, Johns Hopkins, and New York University, where she obtained her B.Sc. in 1933. She received her medical degree in 1936 from Cornell, where she was one of only four women in the class.

In her youth, Bernard and her mother were involved in the Clarkstown Country Club in Rockland County, N.Y. Despite its name, Clarkstown was an early American ashram founded by Pierre A. Bernard, one of the first teachers of yoga in the U.S. Viola Bernard lived there from 1926 to 1930 studying yoga and Eastern philosophy. In 1934 she married Pierre Bernard’s nephew, Theos Casimir Bernard, an anthropologist and explorer who undertook pioneering expeditions to Tibet. After Viola Bernard’s graduation from medical school in 1936, the couple took an extended trip through Japan, China and India. Though Viola had to return to the United States to begin her medical internship, Theos continued on to Tibet where he became one of the few Westerners ever allowed to winter in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. The couple divorced in 1938 and Theos Bernard was killed in India in 1947 while on a return expedition to Tibet. Viola Bernard never remarried.