Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language, fifty years before the more famous Helen Keller. Boston, Massachusetts, c.1845.

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image showing Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language, fifty years before the more famous Helen Keller. Boston, Massachusetts, c.1845.

salsifufu on March 7th, 2018 at 12:06 UTC »

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Laura Dewey Bridgman was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on December 21, 1829, to hardworking New England farmers. At the age of 24 months, she fell ill with scarlet fever for many weeks and lost her sight, hearing, sense of smell, and nearly all of her sense of taste.

Communication between Laura and her family was very limited. She developed a rudimentary sign language, but as she grew older she frequently had temper tantrums, and by the time she was seven she could be controlled only by being physically overpowered. Laura’s father was the only family member she would obey.

Five years after the Perkins School for the Blind opened its doors, Director Samuel Gridley Howe heard about Laura and was eager to try educating her. In that era, people who were deaf-blind were considered hopelessly unreachable. Howe traveled to Hanover, New Hampshire, and easily convinced her busy family that Laura’s best chance lay in going to Perkins School for the Blind. She arrived at the school in October of 1837, 11 weeks before her eighth birthday.

No one had succeeded in teaching language to someone who was deaf-blind, and Howe was now faced with creating a method of education. Instead of expanding upon Laura’s natural sign language, he decided to teach her English. He gave her familiar objects, such as forks and keys, with name labels made of raised letters pasted upon them. When he gave her detached labels with the same words, she matched them with their objects. However, Howe could tell that “the only intellectual exercise was that of imitation and memory.”

Howe next cut up the labels so each letter was separate. He spelled the now-familiar words, showed them to Laura, then jumbled the letters. Laura was able to rearrange them so they once again spelled the words. According to Howe, it was at this point that Laura grasped the concept of language and communication, and from the moment she understood that objects have names, Laura eagerly demanded to be taught the name of everything she encountered.

During the next year of her education, her teachers focused on expanding her communication skills and vocabulary. Once she mastered language, her curriculum became much like that of the other pupils at Perkins, and she attended classes and studied reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, history, grammar, algebra, geometry, physiology, philosophy and history.

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Abimor-BehindYou on March 7th, 2018 at 12:37 UTC »

Pictured here shortly before she freed Neo from the Matrix.

frustratinbubble on March 7th, 2018 at 13:14 UTC »

Looks familiar...