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Gunn was born on May 25, 1883, in London, England, one of four children of Michael Gunn, a theatrical manager, and Barbara Elizabeth (Johnston) Gunn. His unusual first name derived from a landmark in his ancestral Irish village of Wexford.
Reared in England, Gunn attended Kensington Park College in London, 1896-1900. At the age of seventeen he came to the United States to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received the S. B. degree in biology in 1905. He later (1917) earned a certificate from the Harvard-Technology School for Health Officers. At M. I. T. he studied under William Thompson Sedgwick, participating in the early public health investigations conducted at the Institute's Sanitary Research Laboratory and Sewage Experiment Station.
Like many early students of sanitary science, Gunn began his career as a bacteriologist, working first at the Boston Bio-Chemical Laboratory and then as assistant bacteriologist to the Iowa State Board of Health (1906-1908). Gunn's first experience with the broader problems of public health administration came when he accepted the position of health officer of Orange, New Jersey, in 1908. Disturbed by the number of tuberculosis cases that were never reported until after the patient died, he organized an unusual program for the detection of unidentified infection. Instead of relying on physicians' reports, he developed a cooperative campaign among the local branch of the National Tuberculosis Association, voluntary social work agencies, and the board of health. He joined with Dr. Charles V. Chapin, health officer for Providence, Rhode Island, in urging public health departments to make "scientific budgets, " allocating their limited resources to the prevention of disease, rather than garbage collection and plumbing inspection. Gunn returned to M. I. T. as an instructor in sanitary biology in 1910, retaining a particular interest in the organization of health services for cities. While he continued to teach until 1917 and was promoted to the rank of associate professor, he also found time to serve (1911) as sanitary consultant to the Milwaukee Bureau of Economy and Efficiency under the economist John R. Commons. Gunn's papers on milk, housing, communicable disease, and the organization of public health administration received national recognition. He was elected secretary of the American Public Health Association in 1912 and for the next five years served as managing editor and then editor of its American Journal of Public Health. At a time when the association was attempting to increase its membership and influence without sacrificing newly acquired professional standards, he succeeded in doubling the Journal's circulation. He was a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Labor and Industries, 1913-14, when it first undertook sanitary inspection of factories, and in 1915-16 was director of a pioneering Division of Hygiene in the reorganized Massachusetts Department of Health. Gunn's energy, broad experience, and fluency in French led to his appointment, in the summer of 1917, as associate director of the Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in France, sponsored jointly by the Rockefeller Foundation and the French government. The commission established a rural and an urban demonstration project, organized courses for French medical personnel, and, with the American Red Cross, equipped dispensaries throughout France. A survey of tuberculosis in the industrial cities of northern France, intended to augment existing public health services, was among the responsibilities assigned to Gunn. As the Foundation gradually turned over its program to French authorities, Gunn was sent in 1920 to Prague, as adviser to the new Czechoslovakian Ministry of Health. He returned to the Paris office of the Foundation in 1922, where he remained for the next ten years. Named associate regional director of the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division in 1925, he gave advice on the organization of health services throughout the continent. From 1927 to 1941 he was a vice-president of the Foundation. Following a short visit to China in the summer of 1931, Gunn urged the Rockefeller Foundation to integrate its medical and public health services in that country with Chinese institutions, rather than establish enclaves of American scientific experts; the traditional, isolated, missionary approach, he felt, could stifle or disrupt native efforts to improve social and economic conditions. He put this policy into effect while personally guiding the Rockefeller Foundation's major commitment in China from 1932 to 1937. Although he recognized the political instability of the Nanking Kuomintang government, he pursued a program designed to lend authority to Chinese initiative in rural reconstruction, scientific and medical education, and public health. With the outbreak of war in 1939, Gunn was again sent to France; he remained until six days before the Nazis overran Paris in 1940. Upon his return to the United States, the Rockefeller Foundation lent him to the National Health Council for a three-year survey of voluntary health agencies. He put this work aside for one year, in 1943, to direct the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation, predecessor to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Gunn's active career left him little time for writing. His reports to the Rockefeller Foundation, particularly on China, testify to his profound understanding of complex political and social issues and his imaginative adaptation of Western public health standards. His comprehensive study Voluntary Health Agencies, written with Philip S. Platt, was published posthumously in 1945. Versatile and fun-loving, Gunn also wrote a children's book, The Doings of Dinkie (1937). Gunn died of a coronary thrombosis at the age of sixty-one at his home in Newtown, Connecticut, on August 2, 1944.
Member of the Massachusetts State Board of Labor and Industries (1913-1914), director of Division of Hygiene in Massachusetts Department of Health (1915-1916), associate director of the Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis (1917), vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division (1927-1941)
Gunn was married on November 15, 1911, to Clara J. Coffin of East Orange, New Jersey, by whom he had a daughter, Barbara Mary (born 1916), his only child. Following a divorce (1930), he married the actress Carroll McComas in Shanghai on July 6, 1933.
