Educating the blind in the age of enlightenment. Growing points of a social service

Proxime mortis calamitas est caecum esse Cardanus CARDANUS said, when discussing possible advantages to be derived from adversity, that next to death, blindness was the worst misfortune that could befall any person.'This he wrote at the time of the Renaissance, but even when the age of Enlightenment had arrived, a blind person's position in society had not changed.Throughout the centuries we hear of isolated instances where blind persons in particularly privi- leged situations could attain achievements in some intellectual pursuits like, for instance, Elizabeth Waldkirch in Switzerland in the late seventeenth century.2The vast majority of the blind, however, were rejected by society, and especially those who were blind from birth or early childhood, had no chance whatever of any form of education, nor of any employment.They could only expect a miserable life as beggars on street corners and at church doors or as mendicant street musicians.Blacklock3 looked on the neglect of the education of the blind as a social crime, which would rebound on to the society which had committed it.4The first step towards progress in the education of blind people was made by the invention of an ingeniously simple appliance which enabled blind persons to perform mathematical calculations.