Dr. Stevenson was born in Philadelphia and received his B.S. from Bucknell (PA, 1915), M.S. (1916), and M.D. (1919) from Johns Hopkins Medical School. He interned at Johns Hopkins, then moved to the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and also served as an instructor in psychiatry at Cornell University Medical School.
In 1923, Dr. Stevenson was appointed as a research psychiatrist at a training school in New Jersey, and the following year he moved to the Child Guidance Clinic in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was actively involved in community clinics and community psychiatry, including the American Public Health Association, the National Council on Rehabilitation, the National Advisory Council on Mental Health, the American Association of Medical Social Workers, the Society for Research in Psychoneurotic Medicine, the World Federation for Mental Health, and the U.S. Commission for UNESCO.
Dr. Stevenson was a Professor of Psychology at Rutgers Medical School (1970–74). He edited five volumes of “Proceedings of Conferences on Administrative Medicine” for the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation (1955–58) and also published several books and contributed over 100 articles to the psychiatric literature. Dr. Stevenson was President of the American Orthopsychiatry Association (1934) and the World Federation for Mental Health (1961).
Dr. Stevenson was President of the American Psychiatric Association (1949–50).