Book Review

The last major book on Laura Bridgman appeared in 1903 and was written by the daughters of Bridgman's educator and the director of the Perkins School for the Blind, Samuel Gridley Howe. They were indignant that their effort to exalt their father's labor was completely overshadowed by Helen Keller's The Story of My Life (1902). The contemporary authors Ernest Freeberg and Elisabeth Gitter have each written on Laura Bridgman, bringing the once world-famous woman to a revealing place in the intellectual, reform, and disability history of the nineteenth-century United States.	1
In the 1840s and 1850s, Laura Bridgman was called the most famous female in the world outside of the queen of England. Under the direction of Samuel Gridley Howe, a revolving team of female teachers taught the young girl, who had become deaf and blind at the age of two, to finger-spell, to sew, to read raised letters, and to write. Guided by her listing as a major attraction in tourist guides, the world's rich and famous came to view her in public exhibitions. She enabled the fame of Howe and cemented the reputation of the Perkins School for the Blind. Once an adult, no longer the precocious tourist attraction, she faded into anonymity and the halls of Perkins, where she died in 1889 at the age of 60.	2
The almost simultaneous publication of these two books and the intense interest they have generated reflect current interest in disability. The books substantiate the claims of other scholars that disability, as a tool of analysis, can uncover the hegemonic and constructed nature of mental and physical "normality." Both of these books are weaker than they could have been, however, because both Freeberg and Gitter (although in different ways) fail to take full advantage of the theoretical and historiographical developments in disability scholarship.	. . .