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Laura Bridgman

Laura Dewey 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. However, there are accounts of deaf-blind people communicating in tactile sign language before this time, and the deafblind Victorine Morriseau (1789-1832) had successfully learned French as a child some years earlier.

Bridgman's family in Hanover, New Hampshire was struck with scarlet fever when she was 2 years old. The illness killed her two older sisters and a brother and left her deaf, blind, and without a sense of smell or taste. She learned through touch to sew and knit as a child but had no language. She was brought to the Perkins School for the Blind in October 1837, age 7, by Samuel Gridley Howe, the director of the school. Howe had been recently met Julia Brace, a deafblind resident at the American School for the Deaf who communicated using tactile sign, and developed a plan to teach the young Bridgman to read and write through tactile means — something that had not been attempted previously, to his knowledge. At first he used words printed with raised letters, and later they progressed to using a manual alphabet expressed through tactile sign. Eventually she received a broad education.

Charles Dickens visited the school in 1842 and, impressed by Bridgman's successful education, wrote about her in his American Notes. Decades later, Helen Keller's mother Kate Keller read this account and was inspired to seek advice which led to her hiring a teacher and former pupil of the same school, Anne Sullivan. Sullivan learned the manual alphabet from Bridgman which she took back to Helen, along with a doll that Bridgman had made for her.

Bridgman remained at the school as a sewing teacher for the rest of her life. She was buried at Dana Cemetery in Hanover, New Hampshire.

A Liberty ship was named after her.

Wikisource has an original article from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica about:

Bridgman, Laura Dewey

• Lampson, Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman (Boston, 1878)
• Mrs. Elliott and Hall, Laura , 1903)
• Edith Fisher Hunter, Child of the Silent Night (1963) (ISBN 0-395-06835-5)
• The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl (ISBN 0-374-11738-1), by Elisabeth Gitter (2001)
• The Education of Laura Bridgman : First Deaf and blind Person to Learn Language (ISBN 0-674-00589-9), by Ernest Freeberg (2001)
• Dickens gave an account of her in his American Notes.
• Laura E. Richards: The Story of an Opened Door. 1928.

• Laura Dewey Bridgman collection at The Leonard Axe Library, Pittsburg State University.
• Laura Dewey Bridgman at Findagrave