Private Committal Service
Section 57 Lot 14 Grave 1B
Wessen, Albert F., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, Brown University
Departments of Sociology and Community Medicine
Albert Foberg Wessen was born October 20, 1924 in Topeka, Ks. He was baptized at First Lutheran Church
on April 5, 1925. He graduated from Topeka High School in 1942, and began his freshman year at University of Chicago. With the onset of America’s entry into WW2, he enlisted and went into basic training. Just as his unit was to leave for action in Europe, he was reassigned to ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) first at University of Connecticut at Storrs, (in Engineering) and then at Yale University (in pre-Med). He began medical school at Flower Hospital in New York but instead under the GI bill he returned to Yale after the war to receive his BA in 1946, double-majoring in Sociology and History, and his PhD in Medical Sociology in 1951. He met Marjorie Alice Rovelstad at the Lutheran Student Association there. She was in the Master’s program at Yale School of Nursing. They were married on August 27, 1949 at United Lutheran Church in Oak Park IL.
Al taught at Yale from 1951-1956. Yale School of Medicine appointed him as the first research sociologist to any medical school in 1951; thereafter, he was Asst. Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Vermont (1956-58); Professor of Medical Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. (1958-1967); Chief of the Behavioural Sciences Unit at World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland (1967-1971); Professor of Medical Science (Community Medicine in the Brown Medical School) and of Sociology at Brown University in Providence, RI. from September 1971 to January 1994. At Brown, he served as Chair of the Department of Sociology (1977-1982) and as Chair of the Section that became the Department of Community Health (1973-78). Dr. Wessen officially retired in 1994, but stayed active in advising students on senior theses and dissertations, serving on the MPH admissions committee, and providing consultation on the formation of the new Brown Department and then School of Public Health.
He edited and was one of the authors of Migration in a Small Society: the Case of Tokelau, published in 1992 by Oxford University Press, has written more than 70 professional papers and monographs, and co-authored Health Systems in Transition published in 1999 by Sage.
While at World Health Organization, Al consulted on research projects at all of the WHO regional offices and visited more than 100 countries. He was an indefatigible traveler, loving nothing better than exploring every place of interest, church, museum and historical marker wherever he was. He imbued in all of his family a love of travel and an international perspective; living in Geneva, Switzerland and attending International School (Ecolint) was a very formative experience for all four children. He also took the family on half year sabbaticals to University of Leicester in England first in 1967 and 1978 and subsets of the family to Wellington, New Zealand in 1984 (where he collected research data for the book he planned to edit) and to Oxford University in England in 1993 (where he did further research).
Al was a family man, an absent minded professor with his head always in a book or the newspaper, but was always ready to pick up a grandchild and carry them on his shoulder, or to tutor his children or granddaughters on a math problem or history paper. He loved baseball and knew all the sports statistics, read countless timetables, loved steam engines, and pored over endless maps planning road trips which in later years were then actualized with his son Paul every summer on his visits to the West Coast. Earlier, he had managed to take his family of six on cross-country road trips to every State in the Union except for Alaska, Hawaii and the Carolinas before they embarked on further international travels during the years they lived in Europe. He loved Bach and discovered that his booming bass voice was not monotone but choir material, and he sang in church choirs and Bach choral groups with his wife Marjorie for many years. He was very involved in the Lutheran church and served on the church council in every church to which the family belonged over the years.
He was loving father to Barbara and Elizabeth, born in New Haven, to Paul born in Vermont and to Tim, born in St. Louis. He also enjoyed being long distance grandfather to Matthew, Jenna, Rebecca and Sara Wessen Chang (children of Barbara and Michael Chang), and to Wesley and Nathan Wessen (children of Paul and Kathryn Ndab Fri) all from Sacramento, California, and local “Gamp” to Jia and Sonia Wessen (children of Elizabeth) who lived just down the street in Barrington.
Arrangements made by Quinn Funeral Home.
