Laura Bridgman and the History of Disability

Abstract

In the summer of 1832, on a small farm near Hanover, New Hampshire, the three daughters of Daniel and Harmony Bridgman fell ill with scarlet fever. Two of them died. The youngest, two-year-old Laura, survived, but was left deaf, blind, and with her senses of taste and smell impaired. She retained perception of light and shadow in one eye until the age of five when she walked into the spindle on her mother's spinning wheel and lost that vestige of sight.