William Alanson White

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

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, studied at Cornell from 1885 to 1889, and in 1891 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. From 1903, he was superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, a government psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C.. There he spent the rest of his career. Also in 1903, 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.

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. He took an interest in forensic psychology, and worked for better cooperation between the American Psychiatric Association and the American Bar Association. He testified for the defense in the Leopold and Loeb trial.

Lola (Purman) Thurston, whom he married in 1918, and a stepdaughter survived him when he died in Washington.

• Mental Mechanisms (1911)
• Outlines of Psychiatry (fifth edition, revised, 1915)
• Diseases of the Nervous System (1915) Done in collaboration with Smith Ely Jelliffe.
• The Principles of Mental Hygiene (1917)
• Foundations of Psychiatry (1921)
• Essays in Psychopathology (1925)
• The Meaning of Disease (1926)

During White's tenure as superintendent, St. Elizabeths, which served Federal employees, military personnel, and residents of the District of Columbia, underwent significant reforms. What previously had operated as a warehouse for the insane came to provide occupational therapy and psychotherapy. White did away with straitjackets for restraint and opened a beauty parlor for the female patients. 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.