Helen Adams Keller
An American author, political activist and lecturer. She was the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan
, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film.
Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia
, Alabama. Her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green that Helen's grandfather had built decades earlier.
Helen Keller was born with the ability to see and hear. At 19 months old, she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which might have been scarlet
fever . The illness left her both deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington,the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs; by the age of seven, Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family.
In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in
Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind woman,
Laura Bridgman, dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out physician J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in
Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to
Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the
Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in
South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked former student 20-year-old
Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship during which Sullivan evolved into Keller's
governess and eventually her
companion.
Anne Sullivan arrived at Keller's house in March 1887, and immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the doll.Keller's big breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world. Due to a protruding left eye, Keller was usually photographed in profile. Both her eyes were replaced in adulthood with glass replicas for "medical and cosmetic reasons".
