William D. Granger

William D. Granger, M.D., was a physician connected with psychiatric care in New York in the late 1800s. In the editions of How to Care for the Insane: A Manual for Nurses available through Project Gutenberg and library records, he is identified as proprietor-physician of Vernon House in Mount Vernon, New York, and formerly first assistant physician at Buffalo State Hospital.

He also described himself as a member of the American Association of Superintendents of Hospitals for the Insane and the New York Neurological Society. Those affiliations help place him within the professional world of early mental health treatment, at a time when asylums and hospital-based care shaped most formal responses to psychiatric illness.

Today, Granger is remembered mainly for his nursing manual rather than for a large body of published work. The book is valuable as a historical document: it shows how caregivers were trained, what kinds of behavior and observation were expected of nurses, and how mental illness was understood in his era.