![]() ![]() This organization is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition. ![]() In 1915, Helen Keller and George Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. She was a suffragist, a pacifist, a Wilson opposer, a radical socialist, and a birth control supporter. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities amid numerous other causes. Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. Winnie Corbally was Helen's companion for the rest of her life. Polly had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in 1960. They travelled worldwide raising funding for the blind. Īfter Anne died in 1936, Helen and Polly moved to Connecticut. She progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Helen. She was a young woman from Scotland who didn't have experience with deaf or blind people. Anne married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. CompanionsĪnne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught her. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe magna cum laude, becoming the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Her admirer Mark Twain had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleton Rogers, who, with his wife, paid for her education. In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts and Helen entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College. In 1894, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan moved to New York City to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1888, Keller attended the Royal Institute For the Blind. Later Keller learned Braille, and used it to read not only English but also French, German, Greek, and Latin. Sullivan taught her charge to speak using the Tadoma method of touching the lips and throat of others as they speak, combined with fingerspelling letters on the palm of the child's hand. Kåta's success inspired Keller to want to learn to speak as well. In 1890, ten-year-old Helen Keller was introduced to the story of Ragnhild Kåta, a deafblind Norwegian girl who had learned to speak. Keller's big breakthrough in communication came one day when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on her palm, while running cool water over her hand, symbolized the idea of "water" she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world (including her prized doll). Her first task was to instill discipline in the spoiled girl. Sullivan got permission from Keller's father to isolate the girl from the rest of the family in a little house in their garden. ![]() It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship, eventually evolving into governess and then eventual companion. The school delegated teacher and former student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and then only 20 years old, to become Keller's instructor. Bell advised the couple to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston. He, subsequently, put them in touch with Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. In 1886, her mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deafblind child, Laura Bridgman, dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out Dr. Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan. In his doctoral dissertation, "Deaf-blind Children (psychological development in a process of education)" (1971, Moscow Defectology Institute), Soviet blind-deaf psychologist Meshcheryakov asserted that Washington's friendship and teaching was crucial for Keller's later developments. At that time her only communication partner was Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who was able to create a sign language with her by age seven, she had over 60 home signs to communicate with her family. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. She was not born blind and deaf it was not until nineteen months of age that she came down with an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which could have possibly been scarlet fever or meningitis. The Keller family originates from Germany, and at least one source claims her father was of Swiss descent. Keller, a former officer of the Confederate Army, and Kate Adams Keller, a cousin of Robert E. Helen Keller was born at an estate called Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880, to Captain Arthur H. Helen Keller, age 8, with her tutor Anne Sullivan while vacationing on Cape Cod, July 1888 (photo re-discovered in 2008)
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