Honoring Dr. Renée Fox

This volume on Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry continues the practice of honoring a stellar figure in medical social sciences and humanities. Last year’s honoree was Emerita Professor of Social Medicine and Anthropology, Margaret Lock of McGill University who also provides us with the Quote of the Volume for the Numbers of CMP in 2013.

The honoree for 2013 is Dr. Renée Fox, medical sociologist extraordinaire. Dr. Fox took her Ph.D. in Sociology in 1954 from Harvard. Before joining the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Fox taught at Barnard for 12 years. At the University of Pennsylvania, she held secondary appointments in Psychiatry, Medicine and Nursing. Her interdisciplinarity led to her appointment as Annenberg Professor of Social Sciences. She is now Professor Emerita of Sociology and Emerita Senior Fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Fox is the author of nine books, many of which are ethnographically based including her first, Experiment Perilous on medical research/experimentation to her more recent, Observing Bioethics. This sociologist, ethnographer and bioethicist’s research areas have been (a participant–observer) sociology of medicine, medical research, bioethics and education and medical humanitarianism. Dr. Fox’s perspective and methods make her a most appropriate honoree for Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry for 2013.

As with our last honoree, a list of the books and important articles of Dr. Fox will be published in the last number of this volume year, in December 2013.