Ira Van Gieson

Who was Ira Van Gieson?

Ira Thompson Van Gieson was an American neurologist, psychiatrist, bacteriologist and neuropathologist.

He was born in Long Island in 1866, as the son of Dr Ransford Everett Van Gieson. He was of Dutch-Jewish heritage. Ira Van Gieson graduated from the College of Physicians of Columbia University in 1885. In 1896, he was appointed as first director of the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals for the Insane. He was dismissed after five years because of political controversy involving the newly appointed president of the NY State Commission on Lunacy, Peter Wise. As a result, the whole Institute's faculty resigned and in 1900 a formal "Protest of the Friends of the Present Management of the N.Y. Pathological Institute" was signed. After dismissal, he returned into the service of the New York State Health Department. He practised hypnosis and occasionally served as a forensic psychiatrist.

He died at the age of 47 at the Bellevue Hospital, NY, on March 24, 1913. He suffered from chronic nephritis.