However, at the age of 20 months, Laura unexpectedly became strong and healthy. In her mental and physical development she rapidly regained all the ground she had lost duringher months of illness. Laura was lively, intelligent, and a precocious talker, already beginning to speak in short sentences.When Laura was 24 months old, she and her two older sisters were suddenly stricken with scarlet fever. Both of her sisters died, and Laura was so desperately ill that it seemed she would die as well. After a week, she seemed better, but then the inflammation spread to her eyes and ears, and the fever burned for many weeks. When it finally passed, Laura had lost her sight, hearing, sense of smell, and nearly all of her sense of taste. Her eyeswere so sensitive to light that she had to be kept in a darkened room for five months. She was unable to walk for a year, and unable to sit up all day for another year.

Remarkably, at the age of four, Laura recovered her strength. Her world was changed forever, but her intelligence and eager curiosity were undiminished. Touch was the single sense left to her, and she tried to make sense of her surroundings by exploring everyobject and surface in the house. Laura developed a rudimentary sign language. She created gestures for food and otherbasic needs, and a name sign for each family member. However, communication between Laura and her family was very limited.

When he heard about Laura, he was eager to teach her, and traveled to Hanover, New Hampshire to meet her. Her family, busy with running the farm and overwhelmed by Laura’s increasing behavior problems, was easily convinced that Laura’s best chance lay in being educated at the Boston school.Laura arrived at Perkins in October of 1837, eleven weeks before her eighth birthday.

Laura was taught the manual alphabet, which she learned rapidly and easily. This was an important step because she could now communicate independently, unencumbered by the spelling board and metal cutouts of the alphabet. Eventually she learned to fingerspell so rapidly that only those familiar with the manual alphabet could follow the motions of her fingers. Now Laura was suddenly surrounded by many people. She had a sociable disposition, and she flourished in her new environment.

Even as a child, she was always neatly and appropriately dressed, and never allowed her garmentsto be soiled or disarrayed. She sewed her own clothing with exquisite workmanship, and displayed a keen sense of taste and fashion. As soon as Laura learned to write with pencil and paper, she became an enthusiastic, prolific, and lifelong letterwriter. She was an insatiably curious and demanding student, and her relationship with her teacher was always intense and undoubtedly exhausting.

At first, things went well for Laura at the Bridgman household. However, her busy family had little time or patience to converse with her, answer her incessant questions, and take her for walks and visits. Her health began to deteriorate, and she nearly stopped eating. It was decided that Laura should return to the Perkins School. An endowment was given to ensure that Laura would have a permanent home at the school. Although she remained attached to her family, Laura spent the rest of her life in residence at Perkins School for the Blind, and in her voluminous correspondence often called it her “Sunny Home.”

As Laura grew older, her sorrows and her deep faith had a softening effect on her disposition. Her lifelong impatience and irritability were replaced with kindness and gentleness. Laura’s wit and love of a good joke remained with her always. She wasindustrious and sociable to the end of her life. When she was 59, Laura Bridgman became ill with erysipelas, a streptococcus infection. After several weeks, she died peacefully at Perkins on May 24, 1889.