Jerry Gaw

Jerry Lewis Gaw (Historian at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee)
Born	March 12, 1952 Gainesboro, Jackson County Tennessee, USA
Spouse	Vicki Renee Clayton Gaw (married 1976)

Jerry Lewis Gaw (born March 12, 1952) is a professor of history at the Church of Christ-affiliated Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, whose research specialization is concentrated in the fields of Great Britain, modern Europe, and the history of medicine. He is also a Church of Christ minister.   

Background

  Gaw is the youngest of five children born to Lewis Ambrose Gaw (1918-1995) and the former Sylvia Gerlene Hix (1918-1996) in Gainesboro in Jackson County located on the Cumberland Plateau near Cookeville in north Tennessee not far from  the Kentucky border. His oldest 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. Lewis, Charles, Shirley, and Gary Gaw are interred at the Gaw Family Cemetery No. 1 in Gainesboro. Sylvia Gaw was cremated.

During much of his childhood, Jerry Gaw resided in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, because his father was employed in the  automobile industry. They returned to Gainesboro, at which he graduated in 1970 from Jackson County High School, located at 190 Blue Devil Lane in Gainesboro, a street named for the school sports teams.    In 1974, Gaw  received his Bachelor of Arts in history education from the then David Lipscomb College. He then taught in Church of Christ-related schools in Pensacola, Florida, from 1974 to 1976 and in Shreveport, Louisiana, at the since closed Shreve Christian School from 1978 to 1979, when he entered Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, from which he procured in 1983 his Master of Arts degree in history. He was a full-time pulpit minister in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, from 1976 to 1978 and thereafter an associate pastor in Shreveport. He 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, while he was also completing the master's requirements at Northwestern State University. 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 has been married since 1976 to  the former Vicki Renee Clayton (born May 28, 1956), a Lipscomb administrative assistant originally from Shreveport. They have one son, David Clayton Gaw (born 1977), 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 England, 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."

Gaw is listed with Who's Who in the South and Southwest. He is a member and the faculty sponsor of Phi Alpha Theta, the honorary history society. He also holds membership in the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, the North American Conference on British Studies, and the European section of the Southern Historical Association.He is a member of the steering committee of the Lipscomb University Lifelong Learning Program, a study geared toward the intellectual stimulation of the retired and semi-retired. He has 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 known as North Louisiana History. He has completed and awaits publication of a biography of the World War I-era British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a member of the Church of Christ denomination. The work examines Lloyd George's religious convictions in the implementation of public policy.