Sociologist, Colleague, Mentor, and Friend: A Life Well Lived

Andrew Christian Twaddle, age 82, died of complications from the COVID-19 virus on Wednesday, December 2, 2020 at the University of Missouri Hospital in Columbia, Missouri. He had been the book review editor for IJC&R. Andrew’s death leaves behind his wife of 57 years, Sarah Anne Wolcott Twaddle, daughters Lisa Ruth Wolcott (Domenic Durante) of Gainesville, FL and Kristin Mara Wolcott Farese (James Farese) of Kentfield, CA, five grandchildren, a sister, niece, nephews, and sisters-in-law. Andrew was pre-deceased by his parents, Paul and Ruth Twaddle, and his brothers-in-law, George H. Mason and Peter D. Baird.

Andrew received his BA from Bucknell University in 1961, his MA from the University of Connecticut in 1963, and his Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University in 1968. During his undergraduate student years at Bucknell, with the Vietnam War heating up, Andrew was working one summer at Lewisburg State Penitentiary and living at the facility. He received a letter from his draft board asking for information in order to classify his draft status. Andrew filled out the various forms and listed Lewisburg State Penitentiary as his current address, whereby he received a 4F classification, absolving him from military service. Andrew certainly was not in favor of the war, but probably realized the humor of the situation when he received his draft board's response and let it be as a fine story. Andrew joined the faculty of the College of the Holy Cross (sociology), Harvard University School of Medicine (preventive medicine), the Massachusetts General Hospital (medicine), the University of Pennsylvania (sociology and community medicine), Northeastern University (sociology), and the University of Western Ontario (sociology), before settling at the University of Missouri in 1971 where he spent the remainder of his career teaching and doing research. Why, you ask, would a Connecticut Yankee settle in Columbia, Missouri, for his academic career? Well, because Andrew thought that health, sickness, medical care institutions, and medical professions were windows on society, helping to grab the attention and develop the sociological imaginations of students from all academic disciplines. Talcott Parsons, one of Andrew’s colleagues at Harvard, put it well in the Foreword to our book, A Sociology of Health, 2nd. Ed. Parsons wrote, “I have long had the conviction that the study of health and illness and of the professional and other organizations devoted to health care is one of the most important fields in which sociologists and other social scientists, such as economists and psychologists, should work.”

The University of Missouri provided Andrew with a pioneering medical sociology program that secured joint appointments for medical sociology faculty (N=8) in the College of Arts and Science, Department of Sociology, and in the School of Medicine, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Social and Behavioral Science Unit (SBS). SBS had roughly 200 contact hours over the first two years of the medical school curriculum where the medical students attended lectures, learned to interview patients, participated in discussion groups, and had field experiences in urban health care, emergency medical care, and rural health care. In addition, Hans Mauksch, the SBS director, had obtained a medical sociology training grant from the National Institutes of Health, Bureau of Health Sciences Research, that offered fellowships to graduate students who wanted to become medical sociologists, and made Andrew its director from 1975-1978. The grant supported over several M.A. and Ph.D. students and attracted many other non-grant students who worked with medical sociology faculty such that roughly forty M.A. and Ph.D. medical sociology students passed through the sociology department between 1973 and 2000, the year that Andrew retired from the university.

Andrew, ever the innovative teacher, established an informal seminar program as part of the Training Grant graduate curriculum. Medical sociology faculty, graduate students, and any other interested graduate students and faculty across the campus were welcome to attend. Seminars were held in the homes, large and small, of medical sociology faculty. Wine and beer flowed along with a short presentation and discussion. University of Missouri Faculty and students presented as did medical care activists and researchers from elsewhere. A partial list of presenters includes Paul Lazarsfeld, founder of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, H. Jack Geiger, developer of the first comprehensive neighborhood health center for the poor in the United States, Peter Kong-ming New, one of the founders of the Society for Applied Anthropology and the first sociologist to study Barefoot Doctors in China, Ramon Jaurigue, chair of the citizen board of directors for the Tucson Neighborhood Health Center, Judith Swazey, trailblazer with Renee Fox on medical ethics, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who conceptualized stages of dying, Martin Martel, Andrew’s Ph.D. advisor at Brown University who studied changing race relations, scholars actively protested for racial equality, and whose research on aging influenced Medicare coverage.

Andrew taught death and dying and interviewing to all first-year medical students taking the required Social and Behavioral Science class, and taught six to twelve second-year medical students in the SBS course on inner-city health care. He designed two field trips each semester, one to Kansas City and the other to Chicago. The Kansas City trip was organized to sensitize the students to the barriers that sick low-income residents faced in seeking medical care. Andrew drove the students in a university van and dropped each student off in different low-income neighborhoods with one quarter, their student ID card, and instructions for meeting Andrew the next afternoon for the trip back to Columbia. The Chicago trip exposed the students to inner-city health care, the American Medical Association’s headquarters, and the original Mayor Richard J. Daly. The students visited Mayor Daly at his modest 1939 bungalow in Bridgeport where he had lived his entire life, observed at the then Cook County Hospital, the Spurgeon Jake Winters Free People’s Health Center, a neighborhood clinic funded by the Black Panthers and located at 3850 W. 16th Street, and spent Sunday morning at breakfast with the CEO and other members of the AMA at their penthouse board room on the Gold Coast overlooking Lake Michigan. During one of the AMA presentations, a politically conservative medical student, known among his classmates as a staunch opponent of single-payer health insurance, leaned in toward Andrew and said, “Man, this is a long way from the Spurgeon Jake Winters Clinic.”

Andrew and I both arrived at the University of Missouri in the summer of 1971 to join medical economists, psychologists, epidemiologists, and family medicine clinicians who had “invaded” the medical school. Hans Mauksch compared our effort to the Normandy Beach invasion in WWII as we attracted lots of medical student hostility in those early years. Andrew helped keep our morale up with his brilliant sense of humor, e.g., arguing with Bruce Biddle, a fellow role theorist and admirer of Andrew’s work on the sick role, over who was going to be the verb and who the noun would be at a planned joint lecture. Would it be “Biddle the Twaddle or Twaddle the Biddle?”

At Missouri, Andrew and I “grew up” together as husbands, fathers, and medical sociologists. We collaborated on two books, did field research together in Sweden, and shared a love of family, medical sociology, ocean sailing, photography, and poetry.

Through it all, Andrew never lost his love for Sarah, family, profession, sailing, nor his sense of humor. I’m hoping to see him again, sometime, maybe on his sailboat Lagom, running with the wind under a full spinnaker in 10-foot seas.

Richard M. Hessler, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
University of Missouri – Columbia
Co-editor: IJC&R