 Bishop was born in Nashville, Tennessee to Eugene Edgar Bishop (1861-1889) and Elizabeth Lindsay Crittenden Bishop.He received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University in 1914 and his Master of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins in 1923.Bishop spent almost the entirety of his career serving as a public health official for the state of Tennessee, but was also a consultant to the federal government and a scientific director and board member of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation.