A Pioneer with Vision

Helen Keller was a pioneer for rights of the disabled. In 1891 when she was nineteen months old, she fell ill from scarlet fever, which left her not only blind but deaf as well. At seven years old she was taken to Alexander Graham Bell, an expert on hearing and speech, who encouraged her parents to enroll Helen in the Institute for the Blind in Boston. There, in her frustration to communicate, she would seem wild, thrashing about and was at first considered to have no mind capable of understanding – in short, an imbecile. Helen’s father found a live-in private tutor, twenty-year old Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen how to finger-spell, as Braille was then called. She learned the code for W-A-T-E-R, but never knowing light or sounds, Helen couldn’t correlate the words to the liquid these letters spelled. Anne thrust Helen’s hand under water flowing from a pump, followed by the letters for water tapped into her hand. Suddenly Helen realized that the cool substance coming from the pump had a name and quickly learned how to read, write, and eventually speak. With Anne Sullivan’s continued friendship, Helen became the first blind and deaf person to graduate from college in 1901. In 1915 the two women founded Helen Keller International, a nonprofit organization that worked to prevent blindness. Not only did Helen become an international speaker, writing twelve books, she also starred in a silent movie and tried her hand at a vaudeville tour. She died of Ondine syndrome during a nap in 1968 at the age of eighty-seven. Anne Sullivan also had a visual impairment, caused when doctors rubbed cocaine on her eyes before performing a procedure to treat pink eye when she was a child. By 1935, a year before her death, she was totally blind. She died at age seventy of coronary artery disease.