His father was a skilled craftsman, described as a perfectionist, who worked with his brothers on the first house by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Krogman came in first on a standardized test among 490 applicants to the University of Chicago, which he attended as an undergraduate and post-graduate, gaining his Ph.D. in 1928.
Starting in 1931 he was an associate professor at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he interacted with many of the leaders of the profession.
Over the years Professor Krogman came to be popularly known as "the bone doctor", examining such famous cases as two boy's skeletons found in the Tower of London.
In 1939 he returned to the faculty of the University of Chicago, as associate professor of both anatomy and physical anthropology, teaching graduate students for the first time.
But without doubt his most famous and influential book was The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine (1962) (updated in 1986), long the definitive work on the topic.