William Alanson White

White (left)William Alanson White (January 24, 1870 – March 7, 1937) was an American neurologist and psychiatrist.

Early life He was born in Brooklyn, New York to parents Alanson White and Harriet Augusta Hawley White. He attended public school in Brooklyn. A young White was influenced by philosopher Herbert Spencer; After White's death, one writer recalled that White "was never seriously shaken from Spencer's hopeful evolutionary catechism, which at the age of 13 he had accepted as the key to all knowledge".

At 15, White entered Cornell, studying there from 1885 to 1889. In 1891, White graduated with an M.D. from the Long Island College Hospital. After serving as an intern for a year, for nine years he was an assistant physician at the Binghamton (New York) State Hospital. There he collaborated with Boris Sidis. He took an interest in forensic psychology, and worked for better cooperation between the American Psychiatric Association and the American Bar Association.

In December 1922, St. Elizabeth's became the first hospital in the US to employ pyrotherapy for the treatment of late-state syphilis. White approved the use of insulin shock therapy for syphilis at St. Elizabeth's.

Lola (Purman) Thurston, whom he married in 1918, and a stepdaughter survived him when he died in Washington in March 1937. For two years in the 1920s, White opened the doors of St. Elizabeths to Alfred Korzybski, enabling Korzybski to directly study mental illness, research that contributed heavily to Korzybski's 1933 Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Korzybski characterized White as "extremely brilliant, very [well] read, very creative, very human, very warm, and very much interested in the future of psychiatry altogether."

White is the namesake of the William Alanson White Institute psychoanalytic clinic in New York City.