Helen Keller was both deaf and blind. She lost her sight and hearing at 19 months old, in February 1882, after a sudden fever-causing illness. She lived with both disabilities for the rest of her life, eventually adding further health challenges in old age.
How She Lost Her Sight and Hearing
Before her illness, Helen Keller was a typically developing toddler who had already begun to speak a few words. Then, at 19 months, she developed a high fever that came on abruptly and left her family terrified. In her own autobiography, she recalled fragmented impressions of that time: her mother trying to soothe her, waking from fitful sleep in pain and bewilderment, and turning her eyes “so dry and hot, to the wall, away from the once-loved light, which came to me dim and yet more dim each day.”
Doctors at the time called it “acute congestion of the stomach and brain,” a vague 19th-century label sometimes referred to as “brain fever.” The fever eventually broke, and her family was relieved she had survived. But it soon became clear that the illness had destroyed both her vision and her hearing completely.
What Actually Caused the Illness
For over a century, biographies attributed Keller’s deafblindness to scarlet fever, rubella, encephalitis, or meningitis. No one knows for certain, because diagnostic tools in 1882 rural Alabama were limited. However, a detailed retrospective analysis published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases makes a strong case for bacterial meningitis. The illness’s abrupt onset, high fever, and the pattern of damage to both eyes and ears closely matches what doctors see in young children with bacterial meningitis. That infection causes swelling around the brain and spinal cord, and in the 1880s, it frequently led to permanent damage to the nerves responsible for sight and hearing. Scarlet fever, while commonly cited, is considered an unlikely explanation because it rarely causes both blindness and deafness together.
What Daily Life Was Like
Being both deaf and blind meant Keller had no access to the two senses most people rely on for language. She couldn’t hear spoken words, read lips, see printed text, or watch someone’s gestures. For the first several years after her illness, she communicated only through a handful of crude home signs she’d invented with her family’s cook’s daughter. By age six, she had developed around 60 of these signs, but she was increasingly frustrated and prone to tantrums.
Everything changed in 1887, when Anne Sullivan arrived as her teacher. Sullivan used a technique called finger spelling: she pressed letter shapes into Helen’s palm, spelling out the names of objects. The famous breakthrough came when Sullivan held Helen’s hand under running water while spelling W-A-T-E-R, and Helen suddenly grasped that the finger patterns represented the thing she was feeling. From that point, she learned language rapidly.
As an adult, Keller relied primarily on tactile signing to communicate with others. This meant placing her hand over someone else’s hand to feel their finger-spelled letters and manual gestures. She also used a method now called Tadoma to understand spoken speech. In this technique, she would place her thumb on a speaker’s lower lip and rest her fingers along their jawline and throat, feeling the vibrations and movements of speech. Low voices were easier to detect than high ones, and thick beards made it harder.
Her Struggle With Spoken Speech
Keller was determined to learn to speak aloud, not just communicate through touch. At age 10, she began vocal lessons with Sarah Fuller, a school principal who gave her eleven sessions. Anne Sullivan then continued the training using the Tadoma approach, where Keller felt her teacher’s face and throat to understand how sounds were physically produced, then tried to replicate those movements herself.
She did learn to vocalize words, but the results were limited. Without being able to hear her own voice, she couldn’t monitor or adjust her pronunciation the way hearing speakers do automatically. Her speech was often difficult for listeners to understand, and she was never truly satisfied with it. She struggled with vocalization throughout her life, and in most public appearances she relied on Sullivan or another interpreter to relay her words to the audience.
How She Earned a College Degree
In 1900, Keller enrolled at Radcliffe College, the women’s college affiliated with Harvard. Her disabilities required significant accommodations that were unusual for the era. Anne Sullivan attended every class alongside her, finger-spelling the lectures into her hand in real time. After each class, Keller would type up what she remembered from the lecture on a typewriter. During exams, she was assigned objective proctors who could assist her if needed. She graduated with honors in 1904, becoming one of the first deafblind people in history to earn a bachelor’s degree.
Health Challenges Later in Life
Keller’s deafblindness remained stable throughout her adult life, but in 1961, at age 80, she suffered a series of strokes. These left her significantly weakened, and she spent her remaining years at her home in Connecticut, largely withdrawn from public life. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, a few weeks before her 88th birthday. Her core disabilities, blindness and deafness, had shaped every aspect of her life from toddlerhood onward, but they never defined the limits of what she accomplished.