In Remembrance of "Chuck"
We are saddened to inform you that our colleague and friend, Charles L. Bosk, PhD, Professor of Sociology at Penn's School of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the Perelman School of Medicine, passed away suddenly on August 30, 2020. Chuck worked at Penn for over 40 years and was a highly valued and longstanding member of the Penn Community. He was an award-winning teacher and a cherished mentor. His work focused broadly on the culture of medicine and he published numerous books and articles on how health care professionals make sense of experiences in which time-pressured decisions are required in situations filled with un-resolvable uncertainty. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and he received the Leo G. Reeder Award from the American Sociological Association for distinguished contributions to the field of Medical Sociology. The award announcement recognized him “as one of the leading sociologists of his generation, [who] has produced original, persuasive and enduring theory and research that have changed the way we sociologists think about issues of professionalization, socialization, mistakes at work, and social problems.” In 2018, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a new book project entitled The Price of Perfection: The Cost of Error. He was currently working on a manuscript: What is a Medical Mistake? Forty Years Wondering, synthesizing his decades of research on the US medical system. He will be sorely missed by his colleagues and friends at Penn and beyond. Our deepest condolences go to his wife Marjorie, daughters Emily and Abigail, son-in-law Ethan Schoolman and grandchildren Finn and Milo Schoolman.
Philadelphia Inquirer Obituary
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Tribute to Chuck Bosk
BY STEVEN JOFFE (PENN CENTER FOR BIO-ETHICS), BASED ON A TRIBUTE WRITTEN BY JOANNA KEMPNER, RUTGERS, AND BETSY ARMSTRONG, PRINCETON
Charles L. Bosk was an influential sociologist whose work on medical education, medical errors and patient safety, the medical profession, bioethics and the ethics of social science research, and social problems was foundational within the field of medical sociology and resonated within clinical medicine, health policy and bioethics. His sociological imagination was dazzling. His contributions span fine-grained, closely observed ethnography and richly reasoned, elegantly argued theory. His wide-ranging influence in sociology, in medicine, and in bioethics was apparent in his appointments as a visiting professor at numerous medical schools, including Johns Hopkins University, and as a fellow at the Hastings Center for Bioethics.
A Baltimore native, Bosk earned his BA at Wesleyan and completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, becoming a leading member of what is sometimes characterized as the “Third School” of Chicago sociology. Bosk was a gifted teacher who made a deep imprint on generations of undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, where he had taught since 1976, with appointments in Sociology, the Center for Bioethics, and the School of Medicine. He won multiple awards within sociology and was elected to the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. Bosk had a long-time affiliation with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as well, as a core faculty member for the RWJF Clinical Scholars Faculty Program, a member of the Steering Committee for the RWJF Health and Society Scholars Program at Penn, and as a mentor for many graduate students who went on to become RWJF post-docs and scholars. In 2006, he won his own grant through RWJF's Investigator Awards program to study how best to reduce medical errors. That project became a large multi-sited ethnography funded by the AHRQ. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 to continue this work.
Bosk was one of those rare sociologists who managed to influence medical culture, which in turn, made hospitals safer places to be. He was an astute observer of specialized worlds, with a knack for questioning widely-accepted authoritative knowledge. His first book, Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure (University of Chicago Press, 1st edition 1979; 2nd expanded edition, 2003), provided an ethnographic account of how attending physicians dealt with the inevitable mistakes made by surgeons-in-training. His incisive analysis not only became deeply influential within sociology, but in the medical profession as well. The book has been a bestseller in medical school bookstores since its publication; generations of surgical residents have turned to the book to make sense of their own experiences. His second book, All God’s Mistakes: Genetic Counseling in a Pediatric Hospital (University of Chicago Press,1992) explored the emerging field of prenatal genetic counseling. Most recently, Bosk was working on how hospitals might improve safety by addressing the culture in which healthcare providers work, rather than relying on technological solutions like checklists. Bosk was an authoritative voice in both academic and policy debates about patient safety and quality improvement, publishing widely within the medical literature and serving on multiple task forces, including at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Bosk was a deeply reflective scholar and his own experience with ethnography in ethically fraught medical settings propelled his scholarly attention to the ethics of social science research. He was an invited fellow on the theme of bioethics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2003-2004. He published two books on the ethical complexity of research, The View from Here: Social Science and Bioethics (Blackwell Publishers, 2007), co-edited with Raymond DeVries, Kristina Orfali, and Leigh Turner, and What Would You Do? Juggling Bioethics and Ethnography (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Bosk is mourned by a wide and deep network of colleagues and former students. A true mensch, he was beloved for his quirky sense of humor and wry wit, his deeply ingrained contranianism, his intellectual generosity, his devotion to his family and to his students, and his wisdom. Bosk is survived by his wife, Marjorie, two daughters and a son-in-law, two grandchildren, and his younger brother, Harry. Friends and colleagues are invited to share memories or send condolences to his family at poppy.bosk@gmail.com.
2 September 2020
Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong, PhD, MPA, Princeton University
Joanna Kempner, PhD, Rutgers University
_____________
Tribute to Charles Bosk forthcoming in ASA Footnotes:
Charles L. Bosk, 72, an influential medical sociologist who spent his career working at the University of Pennsylvania, died of a heart attack in his home on Sunday, August 30th.
Chuck, as he was called by all, possessed a dazzling sociological imagination. He was also a true mensch, whose deeply ingrained contrarianism was balanced by a wry wit, and pure devotion to his family, in which he included many of his former students and mentees.
A Baltimore native, Chuck earned his BA at Wesleyan and completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, with appointments in Sociology, the Center for Bioethics, and the School of Medicine. His foundational work on medical education, medical errors and patient safety, the medical profession, social problems, bioethics, and the ethics of social science research spanned fine-grained, closely observed ethnography and richly reasoned, elegantly argued theory. His wide-ranging influence in sociology, in medicine, and in bioethics was apparent in his appointments as a visiting professor at numerous medical schools, including Johns Hopkins University, and as a fellow at the Hastings Center for Bioethics.
Bosk was one of those rare sociologists who managed to influence medical culture. He was an astute observer of specialized worlds, with a knack for questioning widely-accepted knowledge. His first book, Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure (University of Chicago Press, 1st edition 1979; 2nd expanded edition, 2003), provided an ethnographic account of how attending physicians dealt with the inevitable mistakes made by surgeons-in-training. His incisive analysis not only became deeply influential within sociology, but in the medical profession as well. The book has been a bestseller in medical school bookstores since its publication; generations of surgical residents have turned to the book to make sense of their own experiences. His second book, All God’s Mistakes: Genetic Counseling in a Pediatric Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 1992) explored the emerging field of prenatal genetic counseling. Most recently, Bosk was working on how hospitals might improve safety by addressing the culture in which healthcare providers work, rather than relying on technological solutions like checklists. In 2006, he began an ambitious study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Investigator Award Program, that re-examined the systems approach to reducing error in medicine. This project eventually grew into a large multi-sited ethnography funded by the Agency for Health Research and Quality, and later, in 2018, a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue his work. At the time of his death, he was working on a book, titled The Price of Perfection: The Cost of Error, which promised to transform how we think about medical error.
Bosk was an authoritative voice in academic and policy debates about patient safety and quality improvement, publishing widely within the medical literature and serving on multiple task forces, including at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He was an active member of the Medical Sociology section of ASA, chairing the section from 2002-2003. In 2013, the section awarded him the Leo G. Reeder Distinguished Career Award. That same year, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences.
Chuck was a deeply reflective scholar, whose ethnographic writing is marked by an engagement with the difficulties of representation and a genuine humility about the limitations of the craft. His experience with ethnography in ethically fraught medical settings propelled his scholarly attention to the ethics of social science research more broadly. He published two books on the ethical complexity of research, The View from Here: Social Science and Bioethics (Blackwell Publishers, 2007), co-edited with Raymond DeVries, Kristina Orfali, and Leigh Turner, and What Would You Do? Juggling Bioethics and Ethnography (University of Chicago Press, 2008), after becoming an invited fellow on the theme of bioethics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2003-2004. His work challenged social scientists to take seriously the perplexity of qualitative research with and among fellow human beings.
Bosk was a gifted teacher who made a deep imprint on generations of undergraduate and graduate students. He received the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Graduate Teaching and Mentoring from Penn in 2006. Bosk had a long-time affiliation with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as well, as a core faculty member for the RWJF Clinical Scholars Faculty Program, a member of the Steering Committee for the RWJF Health and Society Scholars Program at Penn, and as a mentor for many graduate students who went on to become RWJF post-docs and scholars.
Bosk is mourned by a wide and deep network of colleagues and former students, who cherish his many “Chuckisms” and pass them along to their own students. Olga Shevchenko (Williams College) remembers, “What’s the point of being an author if you are afraid to assume authority?” Laura Carpenter (Vanderbilt) holds onto this gem: “Never tell a reader what’s wrong with your work before they read it, because they might not otherwise notice.” Carla Keirns (Kansas) recalls Chuck commiserating with her about the frustrations of working in a hospital: "We as a society don't seem to be able to figure out that doing the right thing is often cheaper.” Although we, the authors of this obituary, have too many Chuckisms to share, Betsy offers “Learn from your mistakes. Unfortunately, there’s an infinite number of mistakes you can make for the first time.” Joanna loved Chuck’s most irreverent tips. On presenting at an ASA conference, “Don’t worry. Nobody will remember what you said 15 minutes later.”
Bosk is survived by his wife, Marjorie, children Abigail and Emily Bosk (Ethan Schoolman), two grandchildren (Milo and Finn), and his younger brother, Harry (Dana). Friends and colleagues are invited to share memories or send condolences to his family at poppy.bosk@gmail.com. The Bosks have established the Charles Bosk Memorial Scholarship Fund (www.plumfund.com) for a first-generation college student from Baltimore City College in honor of Chuck’s own experiences as a first-generation college student,
30 October 2020
Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong, PhD, MPA, Princeton University
Joanna Kempner, PhD, Rutgers University