Chalmers Laughlin Gemmill was born in Cresson Pennsylvania on November 24, 1901. He graduated with a degree in chemistry from Lafayette College in 1914, and received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1926. He worked for a while in the Johns Hopkins Department of Physiology, and also did post-graduate research at three institutions overseas: the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Heidelberg, Germany; Lund University in Lund, Sweden; and Cambridge University in Cambridge, England. He married Vivienne Angeline Warry on January 10, 1938, and had one child, Daphne.

In 1941, Dr. Gemmill became an instructor at the Navy's new research center for Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. He rose to the rank of Captain (MC), and was discharged in 1945, when he joined the faculty of the University of Virginia Medical School as a professor in the Department of Pharmacology, a position he held until he retired in 1972. He was Chair of the Department from 1949-1967. While at UVA, he conducted extensive research on a variety of subjects, and was given a grant to do research on the history of medicine, specifically a study of silphium, at the Wellcome Library in London. Dr. Gemmill traveled extensively, and attended a number of the international symposia, keeping scrapbooks of many of his travels.

Dr. Gemmill retired from the Medical School Faculty in 1972 and died in June of 1982.