Jerry W. Stannard was born May 11, 1926 in Los Angeles. He served in the U.S. Navy in World War II and was stationed in the South Pacific.

Stannard earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1949, and a master's degree in philosophy and classics from that university in 1952. He was awarded a doctorate in philosophy and classics from the University of Illinois in 1958.

Stannard joined the University of Kansas faculty in 1967 after teaching at Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers, the University of Colorado, UCLA, and University of California-Santa Barbara. He served as Distinguished Visiting Professor in Texas Tech University's history department and also as a visiting professor at the universities of Bonn, Marburg, Zurich, and Cambridge, and the Czechoslovak Academy of Science.

Stannard was elected to the Société Internationale d'Histoire de la Medecine in 1970, the Société Internationale d'Histoire de la Science in 1971, and the Medieval Academy of America in 1967. He served as a consultant to the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, M.D., and on the Councils of the History of Science Society and the American Association for the History of Medicine. Stannard was also a member of Sigma Xi.

He wrote more than 100 papers and contributed chapters to many books, and also served on the editorial boards of 12 scholarly publications. A book he co-edited, The Folk, was published in 1988.