Source: Courtesy of the Library of Congress. She also ruled out congenital rubella syndrome, which can cause vision loss and deafness, because Keller was reportedly healthy before her illness. Keller also was unlikely to have had tuberculosis, pneumococcal or group B streptococcus meningitis because, in , these diseases probably would have killed her, Gilsdorf said.
Gilsdorf concluded N. Source: Gilsdorf JR. Read next. The daughter of poor Irish immigrants, she entered Perkins at 14 years of age after four horrific years as a ward of the state at the Tewksbury Almshouse in Massachusetts.
She was just 14 years older than her pupil Helen, and she too suffered from serious vision problems. Anne underwent many botched operations at a young age before her sight was partially restored. Anne's success with Helen remains an extraordinary and remarkable story and is best known to people because of the film The Miracle Worker. The film correctly depicted Helen as an unruly, spoiled—but very bright—child who tyrannized the household with her temper tantrums. Anne believed that the key to reaching Helen was to teach her obedience and love.
She saw the need to discipline, but not crush, the spirit of her young charge. As a result, within a week of her arrival, she had gained permission to remove Helen from the main house and live alone with her in the nearby cottage. They remained there for two weeks. Anne began her task of teaching Helen by manually signing into the child's hand. Anne had brought a doll that the children at Perkins had made for her to take to Helen.
By spelling "d-o-l-l" into the child's hand, she hoped to teach her to connect objects with letters. Helen quickly learned to form the letters correctly and in the correct order, but did not know she was spelling a word, or even that words existed. In the days that followed, she learned to spell a great many more words in this uncomprehending way. On April 5, , less than a month after her arrival in Tuscumbia, Anne sought to resolve the confusion her pupil was having between the nouns "mug" and "milk," which Helen confused with the verb "drink.
Anne took Helen to the water pump outside and put Helen's hand under the spout. As the cool water gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other hand the word "w-a-t-e-r" first slowly, then rapidly.
Suddenly, the signals had meaning in Helen's mind. She knew that "water" meant the wonderful cool substance flowing over her hand. Quickly, she stopped and touched the earth and demanded its letter name and by nightfall she had learned 30 words. Helen's early writing, completed seven days before she turned seven the page is dated June 20th, Helen quickly proceeded to master the alphabet, both manual and in raised print for blind readers, and gained facility in reading and writing.
In Helen's handwriting, many round letters look square, but you can easily read everything. Fuller gave Helen 11 lessons, after which Anne taught Helen. Throughout her life, however, Helen remained dissatisfied with her spoken voice, which was hard to understand. By , she had not only written a book, but graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, becoming the first person who was deaf and blind to earn a college degree. She had also learned to speak, although she was always unhappy with her voice as it was hard to understand.
Helen was a true pioneer in her time, and for a woman living in the early 20th century, she was very political and was seen to have some pretty radical ideas. She went on to become a world-famous author and speaker, with a particular focus on speaking out for people with disabilities.
But when Helen was 36 she fell deeply in love with a man called Peter Fagan, an ex-newspaper reporter who was working as her secretary, and they were secretly engaged. A normal infant, she was stricken with an illness at 19 months, probably scarlet fever, which left her blind and deaf. For the next four years, she lived at home, a mute and unruly child.
He referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell , the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in teaching speech to the deaf. Bell examined Helen and arranged to have a teacher sent for her from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. The teacher, year-old Anne Sullivan, was partially blind. Sullivan arrived in Tuscumbia in March and immediately set about teaching this form of sign language to Helen.
That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. By April, her vocabulary was growing by more than a dozen words a day, and in May she began to read and arrange sentences using raised words on cardboard.
By the end of the month, she was reading complete stories. One year later, the seven-year-old Keller made her first visit to the Perkins Institution, where she learned to read Braille. She spent several winters there and in was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In speaking, she usually required an interpreter, such as Sullivan, who was familiar with her sounds and could translate.
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