Stanley Hall, thought that there was something pathological about her curiosity; and Gitter suggests that Laura may have developed, as a consequence of the scarlet fever, a condition of obsessive compulsion known as pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococci.
The notion that Laura was beyond her obvious sensory deprivation medically exceptional was, of course, a notion Howe wished to avoid. Another reason that Howe wanted to postpone Laura's religious instruction had to do with his Unitarianism. He regarded the Calvinist obsession with sin and sacrifice as a superstition, and he didn't want his prize pupil's head filled with gloomy fundamentalist dogma.
Indeed, that the natural religious instinct is free of gloom and dogma is precisely what he hoped to show. But in , when Laura was thirteen, Howe got married, and he and Julia went to Europe, where they stayed for more than a year. He left Laura in the care of Mary Swift, a teacher who did not share his liberal religious views, and, under the relentless pressure of Laura's curiosity, Swift allowed her student to be introduced to old-style religion.
Laura wrote long letters to Howe asking him about God, but his answers were brief and evasive. By the time he returned from Europe, the damage was done. And he was quick, in his imperious manner, to declare her education a failure.
He began to withdraw from her, and to withdraw as well from his earlier insistence that blind children are capable of leading normal lives. The failure of Laura Bridgman's religious education, he later said, was the greatest disappointment of his life. Laura spent her days almost continually in the presence of another person, usually a young woman assigned to be her tutor and companion.
She naturally developed deep and affectionate attachments to these people, as she did to "Doctor," as she called Howe. When they went away, to marry or to take another job, she was crushed.
She begged to go with them, sometimes offering to serve as a housemaid, and her fantasies of how she would minister to her friends are heartbreaking. She imagined herself, she once wrote, with half a dozen wings along her back:. My legs would be so powerful to leap a great distance as well as the kangaroo. My arms could be of much utility. I wish so much to run of my accord as swiftly as my strength will allow me.
I could visit all of my good friends. As Laura grew older, though, her companions drifted away, and Howe was reluctant to commit the funds needed to find new ones. She was too old to be educated any longer; the experiment was finished.
She began regularly visiting her family in New Hampshire. In , when she was thirty-two, she was baptized, by immersion, in a brook near her parents' house, and she became a pious evangelical Christian. She lived another twenty-seven years, still famous but no longer a phenomenon. She commuted between the Perkins Institution and Hanover. She became close to one of her sisters, but the sister died, and in the last years of her life she had no true intimate companions.
Outsiders found her odd and unappealing. Much of her talk was about Christ and Heaven "a good place that God knew that I could not fall off the edge of the floor," she had once described it. In , she was introduced to the young Helen Keller, who annoyed her by stepping on her foot.
A year later, she died. The last word she spelled was "mother. Laura Bridgman received her education in an era when no distinction was generally made between psychology and moral philosophy. It seemed obvious that science would confirm conclusions that had already been reached by abstract reasoning or handed down by Scripture—for example, that the ability to feel veneration is a "higher" attribute than the ability to perceive three-dimensional space.
Phrenology was a particularly crude instance of this tendency, and it was derided by some scientists even in its own time. But Franz Josef Gall was a distinguished neurologist, and he did not think that speculation about the moral order of the universe was beyond his ken as a scientist.
Quite the contrary. By the end of Bridgman's life, this had changed. The two fields split apart, and psychology became a laboratory science. Psychologists studied reaction times and sensory thresholds; they eschewed metaphysical questions. Stanley Hall, the man who diagnosed Bridgman's curiosity as a form of mania, was one of the first of these New Psychologists as experimental psychologists were known in the United States.
The tone of his account of Bridgman's personality, published in Mind a leading journal of the New Psychology in , is clinical, unsentimental, and free of ostentatious moralizing—in almost every way the opposite of Howe's reports on Bridgman forty years earlier. As Freeberg nicely puts it, "Laura Bridgman's sense of balance became far more interesting than her sense of right and wrong.
But it is not so easy to keep philosophical questions out of psychology. Every account of the way the mind works seems to imply some theory of conduct, or some belief about what is important in life.
In , James reviewed a biography of Bridgman written by two of Howe's daughters. The local boys that Laura Stigger first raced against provided a catalyst for the competitive spirit that's driven her to one success after another. She crashed hard in her first-ever race during the summer of , but a bloody knee didn't stop her from finishing and starting her rapid climb through the cross-country ranks. The Austrian dominated the Junior World Series and by enjoyed her best season yet, winning everything she could: the Junior World Championships, the Junior European Championship her fourth European title in four years , the Junior World Cup and every other race on her calendar.
This success wasn't enough for the ambitious Stigger, though, and she topped that in by retaining her Junior XCO World Championship crown in Lenzerheide, Switzerland, before switching disciplines to also win the Road Race World Championships in her home city, Innsbruck.
Despite still being eligible for the junior divisions, in Stigger stepped up to race the U23 Women's XCO World Cup series, where she made an immediate impression by winning the opening race in Albstadt, Germany. There are last names associated with this first name. LURA Stats. RULA Stats. URAL Stats. LAUR Stats.
URLA Stats. RAUL Stats.
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