William Alanson White

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William Alanson White (1870-1937) was an American neurologist and alienist. He was born in Brooklyn, N. Y., studied at Cornell from 1885 to 1889, and two years later graduated from the Long Island College Hospital. For nine years he was an assistant physician at the Binghamton (N. Y.) State Hospital, and from 1903 superintendent of the Government Hospital for the Insane at Washington. In the same year he accepted the post of professor of nervous and mental diseases at Georgetown University, and in 1904 a similar chair at George Washington University, lecturing besides at the Army Medical School. He published Mental Mechanisms (1911) and Outlines of Psychiatry (fifth edition, revised, 1915), and also did important work in collaboration with Smith Ely Jelliffe.

White was president of the American Psychopathological Society in 1922, of the American Psychiatric Association in 1924-25, and of the American Psychoanalytical Society in 1928.

Professor White is the namesake of the William Alanson White Institute.