Laura Bridgman
Laura Dewey Bridgman ( born December 21, 1829 in Hanover (USA), † May 24, 1889 in Boston, Massachusetts ) was the first (known) since early childhood deaf-blind person to discover the language and could be liberated from its isolation.
Life
As another child who is deafblind many years later, the more famous Helen Keller, Laura developed characters, to communicate with her family. Even with Laura 's frustration led about being able to make often difficult to understand to violent outbursts.
With seven years, Laura came to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in the care of Samuel Gridley Howe. Howe had just the deafblind Julia Brace met who also communicated with a self-developed sign language, and devised a method to get to the spirit of deafblind children.
He had to touch the highly intelligent child objects to which signs with raised embossed letters - the so-called Moon Alphabet - glued were ( Howe rejected the then new Braille from ). Then, objects and signs were separated, and Laura was to bring together what belonged together. It led her hands and showed her in this way, what to do. Laura had an excellent memory and made it mostly right. One day she realized that the raised letters of the name of the object in question were and that every thing has a name. The breakthrough came just with a key and the word " key".
Shortly thereafter, Laura learned the manual alphabet for the deaf, by allowing it to feel raised letters with one hand and her finger spelled alphabet letters at the same time in his free hand. She also learned the square script, a kind of pamphlet which was written in pencil.
When Charles Dickens on a trip to America attended the Perkins Institute, he was impressed by the encounter with the twelve year old Laura Bridgman so that he devoted a whole chapter to her in his book American Notes. Reading this chapter has led many years later, Helen Keller's mother, Kate, to contact the Perkins Institute.
Laura Bridgman spent the rest of her life in the blind school and worked as a sewing teacher. All students and teachers dominated the finger alphabet to communicate with Laura can. Laura's favorite student, Anne Sullivan Macy, Helen Keller's teacher later, the Howes methods made use of.
Later, Laura Bridgman stood in the shadow of Helen Keller, whose achievements far surpassed even their own. However, there is little doubt that would have been different without Laura Bridgman Helen Keller's life.
1890 written by the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem, the first biography of Laura Bridgman in the form of a scientific monograph.
Samuel Howe's daughter Laura Richards (named after Laura Bridgman ) wrote in 1928 that Laura Bridgman Biography: The Story of an Opened Door. Published in 2001, Elizabeth lattice Laura Bridgman's life story under the title The Imprisoned Guest.