Herbert Gasser was born in Platteville, Wisconsin, on July 5, 1888. His mother, Jane Griswold, who descended from an early Connecticut family, was a teacher trained in Wisconsin's first State Normal School in Platteville. Gasser's father, Herman, was born in the Tyrol and came to the United States as a boy. Herman was a self-educated man who eventually qualified in medicine and became a country doctor.

After attending State Normal School, Gasser received two degrees in science at the University of Wisconsin, a bachelor's degree in zoology in 1910 and a master's in anatomy in 1911. However, Gasser's future interests were determined by a physiology course in the University's newly organized medical school. The young lecturer who emphasized the new spirit of research in medicine was Joseph Erlanger, the man with whom Gasser would share the Nobel Prize 33 years later. In 1915, he earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University, where he...