Wiliam E. Carter was born in Hatfield, Missouri on Novermber 13, 1882. He received his M.D. from the University of Southern California in 1908, following which he was on the staffs of the Los Angeles County and Children's Hospitals. Coming to the University of California School of Medicine in 1920, he became the first medical director of the outpatient department in 1929; he held the position until his retirement in 1950. He collaborated with Langley Porter in writing the book Management of the Sick Infant and Child, first published in 1922 In 1953 Dr. Carter became a special counselor to the UC medical school faculty and alumni association, and was awarded an honorary doctor of law degree from the university in 1964. He was a member of the San Francisco Medical Society, and built a large collection of manuscripts, photographs and other memorabilia of the history of the UC Medical School. Dr. Carter died on February 14, 1965.

Around the time of his retirement, Dr. Carter conceived the idea of a biography of Karl F. Meyer, the eminent epidemiologist and director of the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research located at the University of California School of Medicine. Dr. Carter had been accumulating and organizing data on his subject's life and times for a few years when Dr. Meyer introduced him to Dr. Vernon Link of the Public Health Service, who simultaneously had been assembling his own biography of Dr. Meyer. Carter and Link decided to pool their efforts. Over the next several years, they conducted numerous interviews with Dr. Meyer and his associates and created a first draft of their projected biography. Around the end of 1958, a number of difficulties arose that convinced Dr. Carter --then in his seventies --that the project probably would not come to fruition in his lifetime. Perceiving the project as no longer viable under his direction, Dr. Carter deposited his manuscript files on the Meyer biography in the UCSF library's Special Collections. By 1963 Dr. Carter had ceded all rights of ownership in the work to his collaborator Dr. Link; it is believed that no further work was completed on the project after this date.