The bride of science: Romance, reason, and Byron's daughter

✍ Scribed by Christopher D. Green

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 206 KB
• Volume: 38
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.1124

✦ Synopsis

Myrtle McGraw was a creative developmental scientist of the 1930s and 1940s whose work we now are beginning to fully appreciate. She had been a teenager in Alabama when she began writing to John Dewey, already a world-class philosopher, in 1914. McGraw and Dewey struck up a father -daughter friendship that persisted while she went to Ohio Wesleyan and subsequently to Columbia University for her Ph.D. in 1931. For the next 20 years, McGraw directed the Normal Child Development Study at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. She did microgenetic studies of neuromuscular skills and capabilities in the human infant, with particular interest in the interplay of behavioral development and neurological maturation. She studied in painstaking detail how the simple action patterns of the infantflexions and extensions, fragmentary reaching, swimming, stepping, climbing movementsare assembled to form more complexly organized action patterns as the infant grows. Dewey was actively interested in McGraw's psychological research. He had an office in Babies Hospital and came daily in the mid-1930s. There was a back-and-forth in their thinking. In books written before McGraw began her laboratory work, Dewey had argued that there are profound connections between human locomotion and judgment. The editors argue (p. 19), "The importance of McGraw's principles of development in Dewey's analysis of judgment in Logic [1938] cannot be overstated."