Stanley Cobb (December 10, 1887 – February 25, 1968) was a neurologist and could be considered "the founder of biological psychiatry in the United States".

[2] His great-grandmother, Augusta Adams Cobb, abandoned her husband and married Mormon prophet Brigham Young as his third wife (out of some 56 wives) in 1843.

Cobb's childhood and education were affected by his stammer, which it is suggested led him to study the neurosciences in an attempt to understand its cause.

He recruited William Lennox as an assistant to investigate the ketogenic diet that had been proposed as being as effective as starvation in the treatment of epilepsy.

In 1930, he was appointed director of the newly opened Harvard Neurological Unit at Boston City Hospital.

This was first published in a local paper but interest gathered and it achieved widespread circulation after being republished in the Audubon Magazine in May, 1963.

[8] Throughout his professional career, Cobb was troubled by the attempts of medical scientists to draw hard-and-fast distinctions between mental and physical symptoms, between psychic and somatic causes, between functional and organic diseases, and even between psychology and physiology.