Margaret Bullowa papers

Margaret Bullowa was born July 22, 1909, in New York City. She received the BA degree from Barnard College in 1930; the MS from Delmar Institute of Public Health of Columbia University in 1942; and the MD degree from New York University’s College of Medicine in 1942.

From 1946 to1947, Bullowa was assistant resident in neurology at the Neurological Institute of New York. Her experience there included six months of training in child neurology. From 1947 to 1953, Bullowa received further training in child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Habit Clinic for Children, and Putnam Children’s Center. The American Board of Neurology and Psychiatry certified Bullowa as a psychiatrist in 1953. She continued private practice until 1972.

In addition to her private practice, Bullowa was staff psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center from 1956 until 1963. She also taught in the Department of Psychiatry of Harvard Medical School from 1957 to 1963.

In 1959, while she was at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Bullowa began extensive research on child language and infant communication. She visited three first-born children of non-academic families weekly, from the birth of the children until they were 2 ½ years old. The families were filmed and tape-recorded for later study of their interactions. Supplementary visits were made for several more years, and other children were also studied for shorter periods. The result was a substantial collection of parallel longitudinal studies, which served as the source of numerous analyses for several years.

When the Massachusetts Mental Health Center could no longer house Bullowa’s research, she became affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1965 she began working with the Research Laboratory of Electronics, the division which supported the study and teaching of linguistics at MIT. She continued her research at MIT until her death.

Margaret Bullowa died May 18, 1978.