W Horsley Gantt

Dr. William Andrew Horsley Gantt (1892 in Wingina, Virginia – 1980) was an American physiologist and psychologist.  He received a B.S. from the University of North Carolina and a medical degree from University of Virginia. In 1922, while doing a medical residency at University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, he took a leave of absence to join the American Relief Administration. From 1922-1923 he was Chief at the Petrograd unit in Russia and studied the effect of famine on health. At this time he met Ivan Pavlov. In 1925, he later returned to Petrograd to study under Pavlov at the Institute of Experimental Medicine.

Gantt translated many of Pavlov's works. Some of them were "Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes" and "Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes: Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry".  He went on to study and publish "Experimental Basis for Neurotic Behavior."  His research earned him the Lasker Award in 1946. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970.

Gantt founded the Pavlovian Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University under Adolf Meyer. He also founded the Psychophysiological Research Laboratory at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Perry Point, Maryland. In 1953, he was suspended from the VA due to his alleged Communist sympathies. He was later cleared and reinstated. In 1955, he founded the Pavlovian Society and was its president until 1965.

Gantt had many notable friends and associates. Some of them were John Dos Passos, Ogden Nash, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and H. L. Mencken.

Category:1892 births
Category:1980 deaths
Category:People from Virginia