Jerry Gaw

Jerry Lewis Gaw (Historian at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee)
Born	March 12, 1952 Gainesboro, Jackson County Tennessee, USA
Died	February 1, 2023 (aged 70) Nashville, Tennessee
Spouse	Vicki Renee Clayton Gaw (married 1976-2023, his death) One son: David Gaw Parents: Lewis Ambrose and Sylvia Gerline Hix Gaw
Religion	Church of Christ associate minister

Jerry Lewis Gaw (March 12, 1952 – February 1, 2023) was a professor of history at the Church of Christ-affiliated Lipscomb University in the capital city of Nashville, Tennessee, whose research specialization is concentrated in the fields of Great Britain, modern Europe, and the history of medicine. He was also an associate minister, most recently at Cheap Hill Church of Christ in Cheap Hill, a community thirty miles from Nashville. He retired from Lipscomb in May 2020.   

Background

Gaw was the youngest of five children born to Lewis Ambrose Gaw (1918-1996) and the former Sylvia Gerlene Hix (1918-1995) in Gainesboro in Jackson County located on the Cumberland Plateau near Cookeville in north Tennessee not far from the Kentucky border. His oldest and surviving sibling, Joy Chaffin, is a homemaker in Jackson, Tennessee. A brother, Charles Lewis Gaw, was stillborn in 1945. Two other siblings were Shirley Dianne Gaw O'Shields (1942-2011) of Monterey in Putnam County in north central Tennessee and Gary D. Gaw (1950-1998), who died of a ruptured esophagus in Lewisburg in Marshall County, Tennessee, approximately midway between Nashville and Huntsville, Alabama. Sylvia Gaw was cremated. Lewis, Charles, Shirley, and Gary Gaw are interred at the Gaw Family Cemetery No. 1 in Gainesboro. Gaw's obituary does not disclose his place of interment.

From 1963 to 1969, Gaw resided in Warren in Macomb County, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, because his father was employed in the automobile industry. The family returned to Gainesboro in time for him to graduate in 1970 from Jackson County High School, located at 190 Blue Devil Lane, a street named for the school sports teams.  

Career

In 1974, Gaw received his Bachelor of Arts in history education from the then David Lipscomb College. From 1974 to 1976, he then taught in Church of Christ-related schools in Pensacola, Florida, and from 1978 to 1979 in Shreveport, Louisiana, at the since closed Shreve Christian School. He entered Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, from which under the department chairman Donald Rawson, he procured in 1983 his Master of Arts degree in history. While he was completing the M.A. from Northwestern, Gaw served part-time between 1978 and 1980 at the since inactive Cotton Valley Church of Christ in Cotton Valley, a village in Webster Parish in northwestern Louisiana, where his wife's grandparents resided. Gaw thereafter enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Mississippi State University in Starkville. After completion of his doctoral course work from 1982 to 1984, he returned permanently to Lipscomb and received his terminal degree in 1990. 

Gaw was married for forty-six years to the former Vicki Renee Clayton, who became a Lipscomb administrative assistant. The couple has one son, David Gaw, also of Nashville.

Academic career

In 1999, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, published Gaw's A Time to Heal: The Diffusion of Listerism in Victorian Britain, a study of the medical progress through antiseptic surgical procedures and other reforms promoted by Joseph Lister. In a review of Gaw's book in the publication Victorian Studies, Margaret Anne Crowther of the University of Glasgow in Scotland writes: "Amongst the useful features of the book is a substantial bibliography of works dealing with Joseph Lister and antiseptic surgery. ... Gaw's approach is to concentrate on the years from the late 1860s to the mid-1880s, when Lister's views, at first highly contentious, began to dominate the medical world."

Professor Gaw is listed with Who's Who in the South and Southwest. He was a member and the faculty sponsor of Phi Alpha Theta, the honorary history society. He held membership in the European section of the Southern Historical Association. He was a member of the since discontinued steering committee of the Lipscomb University Lifelong Learning Program, a study geared toward the intellectual stimulation of the retired and semi-retired. He taught abroad for Lipscomb programs in Bath, Somerset, England, and Vienna, Austria.

In 1980, he penned an article, "Refuge in a Hostile White World: The Negro Church in North Louisiana during Reconstruction,"  in the publication, North Louisiana Historical Association Journal, since renamed North Louisiana History. He was a full-time pulpit minister in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, from 1976 to 1978 and thereafter an associate pastor in Shreveport.

Three weeks after his death, his book David Lloyd George: The Politics of Religious Conviction was posthumously published. The book is a study of the World War I-era British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who was a member of the Church of Christ denomination. The work examines how Lloyd George's religious convictions affected the implementation of public policy. The book examines how the work and theology of Alexander Campbell (1788-1866), a founder of the Stone-Campbell Movement in America, influenced a prominent world leader. Lloyd George’s twelve diaries and the more than three thousand letters he wrote to his brother between 1886 and 1943 provide the foundation for Gaw’s thorough analysis of George’s beliefs and politics. Taken together, these texts show Lloyd George's lifelong adherence to the Church of Christ in Britain and how his faith, in turn, contributed to his proclivity for championing humanitarian, egalitarian, and popular political policies beginning with the first of his fifty-five years in the British Parliament.

Gaw has entries on Edward Jenner and Joseph Lister in The Research Guide to European Historical Biography. He penned two book reviews in The Stone-Campbell Journal, published in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Gaw died at his home in Nashville of a brief illness six weeks before his 71st birthday. He had recovered from a stroke several years before his death.