page_title: Laura Bridgman
section_title: Education at the Perkins School
hierarchical_section_title: Laura Bridgman / Education at the Perkins School
caption_attribution_description: Laura Bridgman
context_page_description: Laura Dewey Lynn Bridgman 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.
context_section_description: 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.
  Howe taught Bridgman words before the individual letters. His first experiment consisted of pasting paper labels upon several common articles such as keys, spoons, and knives, with the names of the articles printed in raised letters. He then had her feel the labels by themselves, and she learned to associate the raised letters with the articles to which they referred. Eventually, she could find the right label for each object from a mixed heap. The next stage was to give her the individual letters and teach her to combine them to spell the words she knew. Gradually, in this way, she learned the alphabet and the ten digits. The whole process showed that she had human intelligence, which only required stimulation, and her own interest in learning became keener as she progressed.
  Howe devoted himself to Bridgman's education and was rewarded with increasing success. On July 24, 1839 she first wrote her own name legibly. On June 20, 1840 she had her first arithmetic lesson, with the aid of a metallic case perforated with square holes, square types being used; and in nineteen days she could add a column of figures amounting to thirty. She was in good health and happy, and was treated as a daughter by Howe. She lived in the director's apartment with Howe and his sister, Jeannette Howe, until Howe married Julia Ward in 1843. Her case already began to interest the public, and others were brought to Dr. Howe for treatment.
caption: Bridgman circa 1855. Daguerreotype by Southworth & Hawes
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