Dr. Benjamin D. Paul, a medical anthropologist at Stanford University who edited an influential textbook on ways that traditional communities struggle to accept health innovations, died on May 24 in a nursing home in Atlanta. He was 94.
The cause was complications stemming from a stroke, his family said.
Dr. Paul was teaching at Harvard when he published ''Health, Culture and Community: Case Studies of Public Reactions to Health Programs'' in 1955. The book details an epidemic of cholera in China, the introduction of birth control to Puerto Rico and an initiative to purify the water supply of a Peruvian village, among other cases. It is used in graduate and undergraduate anthropology courses and remains in print.
Dr. Peter J. Brown, a professor of anthropology at Emory University, said that Dr. Paul came to the conclusion that international aid programs, run by the World Health Organization and other groups, had to consider closely the local cultural beliefs in order to be effective.
Dr. Paul edited ''the first systematic description in which cultures played a role in the acceptance of those health programs,'' Dr. Brown said. ''He believed that people's behavior makes sense if you understand it from their own world view and psychological mindset.''
Dr. Paul also wrote on beliefs about sanitation and the fluoridation of water. Beginning in the 1940's, he also conducted fieldwork in cultural anthropology in the highlands of Guatemala and wrote at length about midwives, marriage customs, medicine and the trends in religion there.
In an acclaimed 1988 account, written with William J. Demarest, ''The Operation of a Death Squad in San Pedro La Laguna,'' he explored the pressures brought by a military dictatorship on Indian residents of a provincial village in Guatemala.
Benjamin David Paul was born in Manhattan. He earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago.
He began teaching at Harvard in 1946 and directed the Harvard School of Public Health's social science program from 1951 to 1962.
Dr. Paul joined Stanford as a professor of anthropology in 1963 and was named chairman of the department from 1967 to 1971. He became a professor emeritus in 1976.
He was a former president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. In 1994, the American Anthropological Association gave him its distinguished service award.
Dr. Paul's wife, the former Lois Fleischman, died in 1975. The couple resided in Stanford, Calif., and Dr. Paul moved to Atlanta two years ago.
He is survived by a son, Dr. Robert A. Paul of Atlanta, an anthropologist and dean of Emory's undergraduate college; a daughter, Dr. Janice C. Paul of Ann Arbor, Mich.; a brother, Elias, of Phoenix; a sister, Fannie Zuckerberg of Chicago; and two grandchildren.
