W. Horsley Gantt
William Andrew Horsley Gantt was an American physiologist and psychiatrist. At the time of his death in 1980, he was one of only two surviving students of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. He spent fifty-six years of his career extending Pavlov's seminal experimental research on classical conditioning. He is also recognized for his research in psychophysiology.
Early life and education
Gantt was born on October 24, 1892, on the Rock Cliff estate in Wingina, Virginia. His father was a businessman and his mother was college-educated. Gantt's father died when he was three years old. When Gantt was twelve years old, his mother enrolled him in the Miller School in Charlottesville, Virginia, which he attended on a scholarship. In 1913, he enrolled at the University of North Carolina, from which he received his B.S. degree in 1917. He then attended the University of Virginia, from which he received his M.D. in 1920.Academic career
In 1922, Gantt began working for the American Relief Administration in Petrograd, Russia, where he studied the health effects of famine and war. In October of that year, Gantt was introduced to Ivan Pavlov by Nicholai Zelheim, one of Pavlov's Russian colleagues. Gantt then completed a one-year residency at University College Medical School, where he studied liver pathology with John William McNee. In 1925, he returned to Russia to work with Pavlov in his laboratory in the Institute of Experimental Medicine.In 1929, Gantt founded the Pavlovian Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University's Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, where John Dewey played a major role in helping him to get a faculty position. He was director of the Pavlovian Laboratory at Johns Hopkins from 1930 to 1964. In 1948, he and William G. Reese founded the Psychological Research Laboratory at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Perry Point, Maryland.
In 1955, Gantt founded the Pavlovian Society, of which he served as president from then until 1965. He went on to found the society's journal, Conditional Reflex, in 1965. He insisted on giving the journal this name because the term "conditional" preserves the fact that the reflex, rather than being fixed, is dependent on a stimulus and subject to change. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Conditional Reflex from 1966 to 1978.