James Vance May

Born in Lawrence, Kansas, in July 1873, he trained at the University of Kansas and then earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to build a career in psychiatry at a time when the field was still struggling for consistent methods and wider public recognition.

May became known as an early advocate for studying mental illness through statistics and classification rather than vague labels or isolated case impressions. He argued that mental disease should be understood as a public health problem, a perspective he developed most fully in Mental Diseases: A Public Health Problem.

He was also active in the professional life of American psychiatry and served as president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1932–1933. He died in 1947, leaving behind work that helped anticipate later efforts to connect mental health, hospital systems, and public policy.