HELEN KELLER 1880-1968

Helen Adams Keller was born on 27th June 1880. At the age of 19 months old, Helen was afflicted with an illness (possibly scarlet fever) which left her deaf and blind. At 6 years old, Helen was examined by Alexander Graham Bell who sent her a 20 year old teacher, Anne Sullivan (Macy), from the Perkins Institution for the Blind (in Boston). Within months, Helen had learned to feel objects and to associate them with words spelled out by finger signals and her palm, to read sentences by feeling raised words on cardboard, and to make her own sentences by arranging words in a frame.

During 1888-1890, Helen spent winters at the Perkins Institution learning braille. She learned to speak under Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf (also in Boston). Helen also learned to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker while the words were simultaneously spelled out to her. After going to school, Helen won admission to Radcliffe College in 1900 and graduated with distinction, she did not let her deafness or blindness stop her!

Helen developed skills never approached by any similarly disabled person.

In 1913, Helen began lecturing (with the aid of an interpreter), primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind, for which she later established a $2 million endowment fund, and her lecture tours took her several times around the world. Helen's efforts to improve the treatment of  the deaf and blind were influential in removing the disabled from assylums.

Helen Keller was a truly amazing and remarkable woman.

DO NOT STAND AT MY GRAVE AND WEEP is a beautiful set of poems to uplift the soul when you have lost a loved one. I can just imagine Helen saying this, as she was such a strong character.