Walther Riese was born June 30, 1890 in Berlin, Germany to an affluent Jewish family. He studied medicine in Berlin, Strasbourg, and received his degree in 1915 from the University of Koenigsberg as part of an expedited program during World War I. After the war, he served as head of the Neuroanatomical Institute at the Frankfurt Clinic, where he shaped his ideas on holistic neurological function and treatment. During his tenure at the Frankfurt Clinic, he began a lifelong collaboration with neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein. After the end of the first World War, soldiers often returned home with illnesses caused by the war. Many German psychiatrists diagnosed these veterans with conditions that could be noted as unrelated to the traumas of war, thus relieving the German National Insurance system of fiscal responsibility for their care. Riese, however, continued to work in his patients' best interests, diagnosing them with war-related ailments and recommending treatments that treated their needs comprehensively.

Walther Riese married fellow physician Hertha Pataky in 1915. Hertha Pataky Riese was born in 1892 to a Jewish-Hungarian family. She studied in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, obtaining her degree in 1916. After the war, she was Director of the Frankfurt Social and Sexual Counseling Center of the Federal Government for Maternal Protection, advocating for birth control and providing abortion services. Like many who were sexual health proponents in the 1920s, she promoted sterilization as a form of birth control, a view which she later abandoned. The Center provided services to both married and unwed mothers, which was unusual during this time period as most sexual health centers catered only to married women.

In January 1933, with the rise to power of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, the Rieses found themselves imprisoned for their religious, political, and medical beliefs. Upon their release, the Rieses and their two daughters fled to Switzerland, only a few days before the German government instituted their Jewish passport system. The family then moved to France with the help of a Rockefeller Foundation research scholarship, where Walther reestablished a research program on comparative neuroanatomy at the University of Lyon. When Nazis invaded France, the family fled to Canada via Morocco, before eventually entering the United States. With a letter of reference from Goldstein and a signed affidavit from birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, Walther, who had obtained another Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, and his family secured residency status in the United States.

Once in the United States, Walther obtained a position at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV), where he built a neuropathology lab and served as a professor of neurology and the history of medicine. Much of his research focused on the history of disease and neurology. He became a pioneer in the field of neuroethics, neurohistory, and traumatology. During his tenure at MCV, he published and in the 1950s, where he described "neuroethics," a new concept in medicine. In 1969, in recognition of his life's work, Riese received the honorary title of professor emeritus at Frankfurt University where he had done much of his work between the world wars. Walther Riese died in 1976 in Richmond, Virginia.

Walther's widow Hertha lived until 1981. Her career in the United States took a different path. Despite her medical qualifications, she was unable to find a suitable professional position as a physician. In 1943 she co-founded the Educational Therapy and Day Care Center in a back room of the "colored library" in Richmond. The center focused on "extremely deprived" and neglected youth, particularly African American children. The center later changed it's name to the Educational Therapy Center and, in 1948, officially became affiliated with the State Department of Mental Hygiene. Her work as director of the center culminated in the book in 1962. She retired a year later.