In the mid-nineteenth century, Laura Bridgman, a young child from New Hampshire, became one of the most famous women in the world. Philosophers, theologians, and educators hailed her as a miracle, and a vast public followed the intimate details of her life with rapt attention. This girl, all but forgotten today, was the first deaf and blind person ever to learn language.
Laura's dark and silent life was transformed when she became the star pupil of the educational crusader Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. Against the backdrop of an antebellum Boston seething with debates about human nature, programs of moral and educational reform, and battles between conservative and liberal Christians, Freeberg tells this extraordinary tale of mentor and student, scientist and experiment.
Under Howe's constant tutelage, Laura voraciously absorbed the world around her, learning to communicate through finger language, as well as to write with confidence. Her remarkable breakthroughs vindicated Howe's faith in the power of education to overcome the most terrible of disabilities. In Howe's hands, Laura's education became an experiment that he hoped would prove his own controversial ideas about the body, mind, and soul.
Poignant and hopeful, The Education of Laura Bridgman is both a success story of how a sightless and soundless girl gained contact with an ever-widening world, and also a cautionary tale about the way moral crusades and scientific progress can compromise each other. Anticipating the life of Helen Keller a half-century later, Laura's is a pioneering story of the journey from isolation to accomplishment, as well as a window onto what it means to be human under the most trying conditions.
Ernest Freeberg is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. In Quest of His Prize
2. Mind over Matter
3. In the Public Eye
4. Body and Mind
5. The Instinct to Be Good
6. Punishing Thoughts
7. Sensing God
8. Crisis
9. Disillusionment
10. A New Theory of Human Nature
11. My Sunny Home
12. Legacy
Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
What People are Saying About This
Steven Mintz
Half a century before Helen Keller, Laura Bridgman became the first deaf and blind person to learn to speak with her fingers. This insightful biography provides an unrivaled account of how her experience chipped away at centuries of accumulated prejudice about disabled people and of a fateful shift in thinking about disabilities, from romantic optimism towards biological determinism. — Steven Mintz, author of Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers
Jean-Christophe Agnew
Ernest Freeberg has given us a model of intellectual and cultural history. Out of the tangled tale of one doctor-patient relationship, he has woven an even more complex epic of dramatic theological, philosophical, and social change. The great "awakening" that Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe struggled to elicit from his blind and deaf charge was a characteristically Victorian one, but The Education of Laura Bridgman speaks with equal power to our own needs and our own times. — Jean-Christophe Agnew, Yale University
Andrew Delbanco
In these pages, the story of Laura Bridgman and her teacher Samuel Gridley Howe becomes both a compelling human drama and a revealing episode in cultural history. With scholarly authority and narrative flair, Freeberg shows how the mixed motives of personal and national pride, intellectual curiosity, and reformist charity impelled one zealous New Englander to take charge of a terribly damaged young girl and lead her into the realm of complex human communication. In the process we get an unusually vivid impression of antebellum American culture. An engaging and informative book. — Andrew Delbanco, Columbia University
Conrad Edick Wright
From the intertwined lives of Samuel Gridley Howe and Laura Bridgman, Howe's most prominent student, Ernest Freeberg has deftly crafted a compelling picture of pioneering American efforts to educate the deaf and blind. This is a sophisticated and important book. — Conrad Edick Wright, Massachusetts Historical Society
Daniel Walker Howe
Ernest Freeberg knows how to tell a story, and he tells two fascinating ones here: that of Laura Bridgman, the deaf and blind child who became one of the most famous women in the nineteenth century, and that of the man who penetrated the silent darkness of her world. Freeberg places their poignant relationship in the context of their times, showing the significance that the scientific community attached to Laura's education, as well as why the general public took such a keen interest in her case. I couldn't put the book down. — Daniel Walker Howe, Rhodes Professor of American History, Oxford University
