biography
| name: |
Howe, Samuel Gridley
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1801–76)
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| biography:
| Physician and social reformer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Immediately after taking his MD from Harvard (1824), he sailed for Greece to serve as a surgeon during the Greeks' independence struggle against the Turks, and stayed there until 1830 to help build the new nation. Back in Boston, in 1832 he became the first director of a new school for the blind and remained as its head until his death. It became the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and he achieved international acclaim for helping educate the blind deaf-mute Laura Dewey Bridgman. He supported Horace Mann's efforts on behalf of public education, helped Dorothea Dix in her campaign for humane treatment of the mentally ill, and fought for prison reform. In the late 1840s he founded the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth (now the Walter E Fernald State School). An opponent of slavery, he and his wife, Julia Ward Howe (married 1843), published the Commonwealth (1853), an abolitionist newspaper. He actively supported the Underground Railway, vigorously opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), and secretly aided John Brown. He also continued to work on behalf of the Greeks, returning to Crete (1866–7) during an uprising against the Turks. But for all his progressive views, he was a man of his time who opposed his wife's public activities, and their marriage was strained during its early decades to the point that divorce was considered. |
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