Laura Dewey Lynn Bridgman (December 21, 1829 – May 24, 1889) is known as the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language, fifty years before the more famous Helen Keller. Bridgman was left deaf-blind at the age of two after contracting scarlet fever. She was educated at the Perkins Institution for the Blind where, under the direction of Samuel Gridley Howe, she learned to read and communicate using Braille and the manual alphabet developed by Charles-Michel de l'Épée.
For several years, Bridgman gained celebrity status when Charles Dickens met her during his 1842 American tour and wrote about her accomplishments in his American Notes. Her fame was short-lived, however, and she spent the remainder of her life in relative obscurity, most of it at the Perkins Institute, where she passed her time sewing and reading books in Braille.
Early years
Laura Bridgman was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, the third daughter of Daniel Bridgman, a Baptist farmer, and his wife Harmony, daughter of Cushman Downer, and granddaughter of Joseph Downer, one of the five first settlers (1761) of Thetford, Vermont. Laura was a delicate infant, small and rickety, and suffered from convulsions until she was eighteen months old. Her family was struck with scarlet fever when Laura was two years old. The illness killed her two older sisters and left her deaf, blind, and without a sense of smell or taste. Though she gradually recovered her health, she remained deaf and blind. Laura's mother kept her well-groomed and showed the child affection, but Laura received little attention from the rest of her family, including her father who, on occasion, tried to "frighten her into obedience" by stamping his foot hard on the floor to startle her with the vibrations. Her closest friend was a kind, mentally impaired hired man of the Bridgmans, Asa Tenney, whom she credited with making her childhood happy. Tenney had some kind of expressive language disorder himself and communicated with Laura in signs. He knew Native Americans who used a sign language (probably Abenaki using Plains Indian Sign Language) and had begun to teach Laura to express herself using these signs when she was sent away to school.
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Education at the Perkins School
In 1837, James Barrett of Dartmouth College saw Bridgman and mentioned her case to Dr. Reuben Mussey, the head of the medical department. Mussey visited the Bridgman home and found Laura an affectionate and intelligent girl who, despite her severe disabilities, could perform basic household tasks such as sewing and setting the table. Mussey sent an account to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, who was eager to educate the young Bridgman, who entered the school on October 12, 1837, two months before her eighth birthday. Bridgman was frightened and homesick at first, but she soon formed an attachment to the house matron, Miss Lydia Hall Drew (1815-1887), who was also her first instructor at the school.
Howe had recently met Julia Brace, a deaf-blind resident at the American School for the Deaf who communicated by using a series of primitive signs; however, her instructors had failed to teach her more advanced methods of communication, such as adapted forms of tactile sign. Howe developed a plan to teach Bridgman to read and write through tactile means — something that had not been attempted previously, to his knowledge. Howe's plan was based on the theories of the French philosopher Denis Diderot, who believed the sense of touch could develop its "own medium of symbolic language." At first, he and his assistant, Lydia Hall Drew, used words printed with raised letters, and later they progressed to using a manual alphabet expressed through mapping the English alphabet on to points and tracing motions on the palm of the hand. Eventually, she received a broad education.
