Volume 48, Number 14 · September 20, 2001
An Experiment in Darkness
By Andrew Delbanco
The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language
by Ernest Freeberg
Harvard University Press, 264 pp., $27.95
The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl
by Elisabeth Gitter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 341 pp., $26.00
In the winter of 1829, a baby girl was born not far from Hanover, New Hampshire, to a farming couple named Daniel and Harmony Bridgman. The Bridgmans were churchgoing Baptists. Shortly after the girl, Laura, had passed her second birthday, scarlet fever attacked the family. With versatile cruelty, it killed her six-year-old and four-year-old sisters but left Laura alive—completely deaf and, to use the blunt word of the doctor who attended her, with her eyes 'spoilt.' She retained some sensitivity to light in one eye until, at the age of five, she pierced it by walking into a spindle projecting from her mother's spinning wheel, and her world went totally dark.
Review, 5196 words
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