Gregory was born on July 14, 1872, in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey of Armenian parents. His father died when he was two years old, and after his mother's remarriage he was shifted from relative to relative. In his youth he bore his stepfather's name of Boulgourjian.
In 1894, the year when the great Armenian massacres began in Turkey, Gregory received the A. B. degree from Central Turkey College, an American mission school at Aintab. There his acquaintance with the medical missionary Fred D. Shepard roused an ambition to go to the United States to study medicine. Upon his arrival he joined a group of Armenians near Albany, New York, and in 1895 enrolled in the Albany Medical College.
Forced to earn his own way, Gregory worked in various laboratories and held summer jobs; during one, at the Binghamton State Hospital, he met the psychiatrist Smith Ely Jelliffe, the beginning of a life-long friendship. At the conclusion of his medical training he assumed the name Gregory, the Anglicized form of his father's surname, Krikorian. Graduating in June 1898, Gregory practiced briefly in Troy, New York, before becoming an intern at Craig Colony for Epileptics in Sonyea, New York. He was then appointed junior assistant physician at Kings Park State Hospital, Long Island. In February 1902 he became assistant alienist in the psychopathic department of Bellevue Hospital in New York City and, two years later, chief alienist and director of the department. When, in 1921, a number of city hospitals were consolidated into one department, Gregory was appointed director of its psychopathic division. One of Gregory's major interests was improving the psychiatric facilities at Bellevue Hospital and transforming them from a largely custodial role to one of treatment and rehabilitation. On trips abroad he studied the construction and management of European psychiatric hospitals, and at home he enlisted the influence of politicians as well as the medical profession. His efforts culminated in the erection of a new Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, housing 600 patients, which was formally opened on November 2, 1933. A year later, for reasons which have never been made clear - perhaps in part because of his close relations with Tammany politicians - Gregory was forced to resign his post under pressure from the new commissioner of hospitals, Sigismund S. Goldwater, an appointee of the fusion reform administration. The city's leading psychiatrists met to protest Gregory's resignation, and the American Journal of Psychiatry denounced Goldwater's action in an acrimonious editorial. An able clinician and teacher, Gregory was professor of mental diseases at the University and Bellevue Medical College (New York University) from 1918 to 1924, when the title was changed to professor of psychiatry; he became professor emeritus in 1937. He had earlier held faculty appointments at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and at the New York Post-Graduate Hospital and Medical College. During World War I he served in the Army Medical Corps as a neuropsychiatrist. He often acted as an expert witness in legal proceedings, and in 1931 he was asked to form a psychiatric clinic at the Court of General Sessions, which in less than three years carried out more than 3, 000 pre-sentencing psychiatric evaluations. In his capacity as administrator and teacher Gregory introduced a number of European innovations in the field of psychiatry. Generations of students, residents, and colleagues learned from him about Kraepelinian classification and the importance of new dynamic concepts, particularly psychoanalysis; it was he, for example, who brought the brilliant analyst Paul Schilder from Vienna to Bellevue. For decades Gregory was among the most influential psychiatrists in shaping the development of his profession in America, not only in New York but, by means of his frequent attendance at professional meetings, throughout the country. Although he often abstracted foreign literature for American physicians, Gregory's own bibliography of articles is short. It reflects his interest in alcoholism (which he believed to be a defense against psychosis) and the relationship of general medicine to psychiatry. His open-mindedness and dynamic approach are suggested by his contention that physicians could learn much about the psychology of illness from nonmedical groups such as Christian Scientists. Gregory died of a sudden heart attack at the age of sixty-nine while playing golf at the Lakeview Country Club at Tuckahoe, New York. In his will he left a bequest to endow a professorship and an annual lectureship at New York University.
President of the New York Psychiatric Society (1930-1932); President of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry (1925-1927)
In appearance, Gregory had a beaming, infectious smile that would inspire a gayer outlook in his most depressed patients. Scarcely more than five feet tall, he was acutely sensitive about his height and once confided to Abraham A. Brill that he had never married for fear that his children would inherit his stature.
Gregory never married.
