Katharine Elizabeth McBride

Katharine McBride was born May 14, 1904, in Philadelphia. She received her A.B. cum laude in 1925, her M.A. in 1927, and her Ph.D. in 1932, all from Bryn Mawr College. While a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College, McBride's dissertation advisor was James Leuba, the founder of Bryn Mawr's psychology research lab. In 1929, Katharine McBride was invited by neurologist, Dr. Theodore Weisenberg, to join an aphasia study. McBride had recently collaborated with Dr. Agnes Rogers, and Dr. Rogers recommended McBride to Dr. Weisenburg for the study. The study was funded, spanned five years and focused on the classification and assessment of aphasia in adults. == Aphasia study ==

The aphasia study included 230 patients and healthy adults, including 60 patients with aphasia. The study was monumental because it was the first aphasia study to use normal controls, to compare patients with and without aphasia, and to use standardized methodology. McBride used a subset of Head's individual tests for their assessment battery, but also supplemented the tests by adding measures of reading, writing, mathematics, and language intelligence. She also added a subset of non-language tests to the battery. In total, McBride and Weisenberg's battery for aphasia included tasks that assessed word repetition, naming, automatic word sequences, understanding spoken language, reading, writing, sentence completion, understanding analogies and opposites, digit and letter span, and sound recognition. The average length of the battery was 19 hours for aphasia patients and only 10 to 15 hours for controls. Only weeks after the final manuscript of the book was sent to the Commonwealth Fund in New York City for publication, Weisenberg died. McBride did not continue research in clinical neuropsychology and instead switched her focus to educational psychology. == Career ==

By 1938, Katharine McBride became an associate professor at Bryn Mawr in both the Education and Psychology departments. In 1938, she was also appointed Assistant Dean at Bryn Mawr. In 1940, she left Bryn Mawr to become the Dean at Radcliffe College in Boston. In McBride's first year as president, she taught Child Psychology and co-led the Psychology Journal Club. McBride also was the Vice President of the College of Entrance Examination Board and Chair of the Committee on Tests. McBride developed the Child Study Institute, a clinical, educational service that in present-day serves as a mental-health services center. She also oversaw the construction of the Mariam Coffin Canaday Library, Erdman Hall, Haffner Hall, and additions to the Park Science Center. McBride made a televised appearance on ABC News Issues and Answers program on September 19, 1965. To a national audience, she espoused her beliefs in equality in higher education, and that greater assistance was needed for disadvantaged individuals to even the playing field in higher education. Katharine McBride died on June 3, 1976, after sustaining a heart attack. == Legacy ==

The "McBride Scholars" program was established in 1984. The Scholarship supports nontraditional, female college students who delayed college due to economic or family issues. A chapter of The Oxford Handbook of History of Clinical Neuropsychology was devoted to Katharine McBride's contributions, and the author stated, "It can be argued that McBride was one of the best neuropsychologists we never had. ==Quotes==

From her research she internalized what she called "an inclination to ask about every event or kind of behavior, 'What can we learn from this?'" ==Works==

• McBride, K. E. (1932). A psychological study of aphasia. Unpublished dissertation, Bryn Mawr College. • Weisenburg, T. H., & McBride, K. E. (1935). Aphasia: A clinical and psychological study. New York, NY: The Commonwealth Fund. • Weisenburg, T. H., Roe, A., & McBride, K. E. (1936). Adult intelligence: A psychological study of test performances. New York, NY: The Commonwealth Fund. • McBride, K. E. (1941). Henry Head: 1861–1940. The American Journal of Psychology, 54, 444–446. • McBride, K. E. (1950). Review of "Language and language disturbances: Aphasic symptom complexes and their significance for medicine and the theory of language." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 45, 404–405. • McBride, K. E. (1972). Higher education and the pace of change (Vol. 1971). [Pittsburgh]: University of Pittsburgh Press. ==References==