Menas S. Gregory, M.D.

While playing golf, his favorite sport, Dr. Menas S. Gregory of New York died suddenly on November 2, 1941, apparently of some cardiac affection. Knowing how intense was his make-up this is the probable diagnosis.

Dr. Gregory was born in Armenia July 7, 1872, and early lost his father. He was then but two years of age and had the unenviable position of being bandied about from one relative to another.

Nevertheless, he had the good fortune to obtain an excellent preliminary education at the Central Turkey College, where he graduated at the age of twenty-two. This college was one supported by American philanthropists. This turned his attention to this country and he found encouragement from friends and entered the Albany Medical School from which he graduated in 1898.

Previously he had found a haven at the Binghamton State Hospital as assistant to Bert Nelson, the pharmacist, and where he met Dr. William A. White and Dr. S. E. Jelliffe who became his life long friends, and from whom he became aware of the psychoanalytic concepts which found a sympathetic place in his psychiatric work.

Because of economic necessities he spent two years as a detail man for the firm of Thomas Leeming and Co. of New York. He thus acquired greater facility in his English for he spoke French better than he did English while in Binghamton. It was when he was at Binghamton that he collected specimens of the blood of general paralytics which made material for a paper on this subject published in the State Hospitals Bulletin (2:397, ). Dr. Gregory then used a native Armenian name, “Boulgourjoo.”*

Some years later Dr. Gregory, Dr. Pearce Bailey, and Dr. Jelliffe attended parts of a semester at Munich with Kraepelin, where Dr. White also joined them for a time and the three visited nearly all of the psychiatric clinics from Paris to Naples. It was on the return trip from Naples that Dr. Gregory and Dr. Jelliffe tramped the decks discussing psychoanalysis; sometimes with such fervor as to amuse some of