Page 254 - The Story of My Lif

It is now sixty-five years since Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe knew that he had made
his way through Laura Bridgman’s fingers to her intelligence. The names of
Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller will always be linked together, and it is

necessary to understand what Dr. Howe did for his pupil before one comes to an
account of Miss Sullivan’s work. For Dr. Howe is the great pioneer on whose
work that of Miss Sullivan and other teachers of the deaf-blind immediately
depends.

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe was born in Boston, November 10, 1801, and died in

Boston, January 9, 1876. He was a great philanthropist, interested especially in
the education of all defectives, the feeble-minded, the blind, and the deaf. Far in
advance of his time he advocated many public measures for the relief of the poor
and the diseased, for which he was laughed at then, but which have since been
put into practice. As head of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, he
heard of Laura Bridgman and had her brought to the Institution on October 4,
1837.

Laura Bridgman was born at Hanover, New Hampshire, December 21, 1829; so
she was almost eight years old when Dr. Howe began his experiments with her.
At the age of twenty-six months scarlet fever left her without sight or hearing.
She also lost her sense of smell and taste. Dr. Howe was an experimental
scientist and had in him the spirit of New England transcendentalism with its
large faith and large charities. Science and faith together led him to try to make
his way into the soul which he believed was born in Laura Bridgman as in every
other human being. His plan was to teach Laura by means of raised types. He
pasted raised labels on objects and made her fit the labels to the objects and the
objects to the labels. When she had learned in this way to associate raised words
with things, in much the same manner, he says, as a dog learns tricks, he began
to resolve the words into their letter elements and to teach her to put together “k-
e-y,”

“c-a-p.” His success convinced him that language can be conveyed through type
to the mind of the blind-deaf child, who, before education, is in the state of the