Dr. Smiley Blanton (May 7, 1882 - October 30, 1966) was born in Unionville, Tennessee, to Hiram and Sallie (Brunson) Blanton. He was educated at Vanderbilt University and earned hi...visualizza altroDr. Smiley Blanton (May 7, 1882 - October 30, 1966) was born in Unionville, Tennessee, to Hiram and Sallie (Brunson) Blanton. He was educated at Vanderbilt University and earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1904. Graduate work in English at Harvard and acting in stock companies and summer stock led directly into a short teaching career at Cornell, where he organized the Dramatic Club and taught speech and dramatics.
After four years he decided to study medicine. He received his M.D. from Cornell University Medical School in 1914. After serving as a doctor in the U. S. Army during World War I, he earned his diploma in Psychological Medicine from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in London, England in 1923. He began his professional career as an Instructor in the Department of Speech at Cornell University (1907-11) and went on to work as a Professor of Speech and Mental Hygiene at the University of Wisconsin (1914-24), as the Director of the Minneapolis Child Guidance Clinic and Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota (1924-27), as a Professor of Child Study at Vassar College (1927-31).
In 1929, he travelled to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud and, at the age of forty-nine, became a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in New York City. He worked as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Cornell University (1933-38) before he joined forces with the minister Norman Vincent Peale and established the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry in 1951.
Dr. Blanton also published several books, including The Art of Real Happiness (1950), Now or Never (1959), and The Healing Power of Poetry (1960). He also collaborated with his wife, Margaret Leslie Gray Blanton, on several other child speech projects, including Speech Training for Children: The Hygiene of Speech (1919), Child Guidance (1927), and For Stutterers (1936).
He died in New York in 1966 at the age of 84.visualizza meno