Identifier: blinddeaf00will (find matches)
Title: Blind Deaf
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: William Wade
Subjects: Deafblindness
Publisher: Hecker Brothers
Contributing Library: American Printing House for the Blind, Inc., M. C. Migel Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Lyrasis Members and Sloan Foundation

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and spells with onlythe tips of the fingers seeming to touch the palmof the readers hand. It certainly seems hard tobelieve that the reader can recognize all positionsof the fingers with this kind of contact. Whatchance have they to distinguish between a and s ?In any position of the readers hand, the differencebetween the finger positions of e and o must be dif-ficult to distinguish by touch. My theory is that the blind-deaf do not read byfeeling the positions of the fingers. It must beprincipally done by feeling the motions in the handgenerally, caused by the finger motions. This viewseems to explain Leslies and Linnies instant com-prehension, Ellas odd way of reading what MissBarrager was saying in chapel, and Evas readingthe wrist spelling, even if she required some repeti-tions. It would also go far toward explaining therapidity and ease with which the Perkins Institu-tion girls spell and read in the — what seems to us— exceedingly difficult positions of the hands of both 120
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LOTTIE SULLIVAN. speller and reader. It will also account for the aw- Theful task it is to spell to Clarence Selby— one that Blind-Deaffew persons I have known can stand for more thana very short time. He covers the spellers hand(sometimes, I think, he uses both hands to read by)and the cramping- of the spellers hand by his cling-ing- is very nerve-upsetting. He evidently reads bythe positions of the fingers, and has to keep hishand (or hands) close down, covering all the fin-gers. I should think that the same is the case withMrs. Nancy Townsend, in the Ohio Home, as shecovers the spellers hand with hers. I thought, when I first stumbled on this oddfact, that it was so far like Crookes discovery ofthe luminosity of the ultra-gaseous state of matter(the cathode rays) that it was a domain we mightlook on, yet never be able to use. Yet there maybe a little, perhaps a very little, use in it. It wouldseem to demonstrate that there is precious little dif-ference how we hold our hands in s

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