Renée C. Fox (1928–2020)

We are sad to say that Advisory Board member Renée Fox died on September 23rd. Renée was an extraordinary friend of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, celebrating and contributing to its uniqueness over many years.

Renée was a pioneer in medical sociology who spent most of her career at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research used participant-observation to explore the work of physicians. In Experiment Perilous (1959), she examined troubling practices of doctors who conducted research on their own patients at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. In The Courage to Fail (1974), written with Judith Swazey, she focused on dangers to patients as their physicians used them as experimental subjects to develop procedures for organ transplantation and hemodialysis. She particularly loved teaching. She guided her medical students, undergraduates, and graduate and nursing students to see medicine as fundamentally a social process and often encouraged them to submit their own work to PBM.

Renée was in important ways my mentor when I became editor. She immediately wrote to welcome me to the task. And she phoned me right away every time (yes, every time) she received her copy of a new issue. She was always breathlessly excited to talk about what was in the issue, eager to diplomatically clue me in to what I should be doing next to keep things going in a good direction, and insistent that the humanistic bent of PBM be preserved and strengthened. She pushed me to become a better editor, one she thought “this amazing journal” deserved.

We are grateful for her generous vision and guidance. And I will always miss those phone calls.