Family care for the chronic insane : Miss Alice Cooke and her patients / by F. B. Sanborn.

  • Franklin Benjamin Sanborn
Date:
[1902]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Family care for the chronic insane : Miss Alice Cooke and her patients / by F. B. Sanborn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    MISS ALICE COOKE AND HER PATIENTS. By F. B. Sanborn, of Concord, Mass. T is an old saying that one half the world does not know how the other half live; it would be truer, perhaps, to say that not one person in a thousand knows the possibilities of human capacity in matters that concern our everyday life. What seemed a miracle or an impossi- bility until we have seen it done, soon becomes familiar and little noticed by us; but to the nine hundred and ninety- nine who have never even thought of its performance, it will still appear a miracle or an impossibility. The first signal instance of this truth which as a youth I saw was the restoration of Laura Bridgman, a deaf, dumb, and blind child of New Hampshire birth, to that companionship of her kind from which her complicated infirmity had excluded her beyond hope, as was thought in 1837, when her liberator appeared one July morning at her father's farmhouse door. It was Dr. Howe of Boston, who had already spent many years of his young life in liber- ating the oppressed and giving eyes to the blind. He persuaded her mother to entrust Laura, then seven years old, to his care at the School for the Blind in South Boston; and five years later, when Charles Dickens saw her, the im- possible had been done, the miracle was accomplished. Let the great novelist describe what he saw in the spring of 1842: I sat down before a girl, blind, deaf, and dumb, destitute of smell and nearly so of taste; before a fair young creature with every human faculty and hope and power and goodness and affection enclosed within her delicate frame,—and but one outward sense,—the sense of touch. There she was before me, built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an immortal soul might be awakened. Long before I looked upon her the help had come. Her face was radi- ant with intelligence and pleasure. From the mournful ruin of such bereavement there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless, grateful-hearted being. I have extracted a few fragments of her history from an account written by that one man who has made her what she is. It is a very beautiful and touching narrative. The name of her great benefactor and friend is Dr. Howe. There are not many persons, I hope and believe, who, after reading these passages, can ever hear that name with indifference. Well may that gentleman call that a delightful moment in which some distant promise of her present state first dawned upon the darkened mind of Laura Bridgman. Throughout his life, the recol- lection of that moment will be to him a source of pure, unfading happiness. This miracle has now become so common that less attention is paid to the more remarkable case of Helen Keller, whom Dr. Howe's son-in-law, Michael Anagnos, taught after his father-in-law's death. But Laura at- tracted the notice of two continents, and her story was read in a dozen lan- guages. Well did Dr. Howe say of her, in 1847, five years after Dickens had seen her: Laura's progress has been a curious and an interesting spectacle. She has come into human society with a sort of triumphal march; her course has been a perpetual ovation. Thousands have been watching her with eager eyes and ap- plauding each successful step; while she, all unconscious of their gaze, holding on to the