Laura Dewey Bridgman

Laura Dewey Bridgman (born December 21, 1829, Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.—died May 24, 1889, Boston, Massachusetts) was the first blind and deaf person in the English-speaking world to learn to communicate using finger spelling and the written word. Predating Helen Keller by nearly two generations, Bridgman was well known for her ability to exchange conversation with teachers, family, peers, and a curious public.

At age two she contracted scarlet fever, which caused her to lose her senses of hearing, sight, smell, and taste. Despite her sensory deficits, she acquired a form of rudimentary gesturing that she used to communicate with her family. In 1837 Bridgman entered the New-England Institution for the Education of the Blind (later known as the Perkins School for the Blind) in Boston, Massachusetts, where she lived for the remainder of her life. Under the direction of American educator Samuel G. Howe, superintendent of the school, and several other teachers there, including Lydia Drew, Mary Swift (Lamson), and Sarah Wight, Bridgman mastered receptive and expressive language skills by using her fingers to recognize raised letters of the English alphabet and to receive and deliver tactile spelling of ordinary English words. She also learned to write by using a block-lettering device. With those skills in place, she acquired knowledge about the natural and human-made world through deliberate and sometimes unplanned tactile encounters with objects. By the time her formal education ended in 1850, she had acquired learning in history, literature, mathematics, and philosophy.

In 1841 Howe commissioned Sophia Peabody, who would soon marry writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to sculpt a clay bust of Bridgman. Upon its completion, Howe had Peabody make several plaster casts of the bust that he took with him on an extended journey through the American South and Old Northwest (Northwest Territory). Advocating for the establishment of blind schools in those regions, Howe left Peabody’s busts of Bridgman with influential legislators, thus spreading the prominence of his blind and deaf student throughout the country.

Bridgman’s fame spread even further a year later. In January 1842, during his first visit to the United States, the novelist Charles Dickens met Bridgman, who was 12 years old, and on his return to England he devoted a chapter of his American Notes (1842) to the story of her “finger language” skills, her education, and her gregarious personality. Not long after, written letters and autographs from Bridgman became prized items throughout the English-speaking world.

Bridgman spent her adult years at the Perkins School, where an endowment on her behalf covered her room and board. Most of her days were spent doing needlework, writing letters, and reading the Bible and religious tracts. She enjoyed communicating with staff, visitors, and family members who could converse with her through finger spelling. She often visited her family in New Hampshire, usually during the summer months. Her thin stature and several periods in her life when she ate little caused her caregivers great concern, leading some contemporary scholars to suggest that Bridgman may have lived with anorexia nervosa.