Skip to content

Lawrence C. Kolb, M.D.

Back to Presidents
I3Base.Presidents.PreviousButton.Label I3Base.Presidents.NextButton.Label
Image of Lawrence C. Kolb, M.D.
  • 1968 - 1969

Dr. Kolb was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a physician in the U.S. Public Health Service.  Dr. Kolb Sr. is credited with proposing the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as part of the National Institutes of Health. NIMH became a reality in 1947 by the Congressional Legislature.

The early education of Dr. Kolb depended on his father’s duty assignments taking place in Brooklyn, N.Y., Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C. He entered Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, receiving his B.A. and winning several prizes there. His medical training occurred at Johns Hopkins, where he graduated in 1934. He spent internships in medicine and surgery at the Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., and later returned to Hopkins (1936–38). He spent a year in neurology as a Markle Fellow at the Queens Square Hospital in London, England, then returned to Hopkins in neurophysiology (1936–41) and later moved to the Milwaukee Sanitarium for a short time until WWII took him into the Navy (1942–1946). He served in the South Pacific and later at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, MD.

Living near Washington, D.C., after the war, Dr. Kolb took a part-time position with the U.S. Public Health Service in charge of the research grant program under Dr. Robert Felix. He also received psychoanalytical training. In 1949, he became a member of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where he remained until 1954, when he assumed the chairmanship of the Department of Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Director of the N.Y. State Psychiatric Institute, and Director of Psychiatry at Presbyterian Hospital. He made many changes, including organizing a Division of Community and Social Psychiatry and supporting the psychoanalytic training school established there. After 1956, he collaborated with Dr. Arthur Noyes in preparation of the 5th and 6th editions of Dr. Noyes’ Textbook, Modern Clinical Psychiatry, and authored the 7th edition alone. His bibliography is wide-ranging.

Dr. Kolb served as President of the American Psychiatric Association (1968–69).