Thomas Gallaudet Biography Essay

“All of the Children of silence must be taught to sing their own song.” This is one of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet’s most famous quotes. Gallaudet lived a very normal childhood, but had a very eventful adult life. Gallaudet was very intelligent child for which led him to go to Yale University at the age of 14. After his college career he met Alice Cogswell, who he did not realise would help him change the lives of all deaf and dumb people for years to come by making the first school especially for them. Most people did not realise that he actually had many health problems during his life. He suffered from nightmares, “nervous attacks”, self inadequacy, and lung problems along his journey for equality for all people. Even with his struggles, Gallaudet was influential all his life from before he met Alice, while he knew her, and even after he died. Thomas Hopkins gallaudet was born on December 10, 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gallaudet was the eldest of thirteen children from his father, Peter Wallace Gallaudet, and his mother, Jane Hopkins. Gallaudet was a very smart child from which he attended college at Yale University in 1801, at age 14, and graduated 1804, at age 17. He soon went back to Yale in 1808 to get his masters degree after finishing a law apprenticeship. He got a degree as a traveling salesman from where he did his job in Kentucky and Ohio. Due to health problems he reverted to joining the Andover Theological Seminary in 1811. Just before he graduated, he became a traveling minister.

During his traveling he

Before Gallaudet lived, Doctors tried to figure out why people were deaf. They would make extra holes in people’s ears and pour solutions in their ears to help them to hear, but nothing worked. While people were so caught up in trying to figure out why people were deaf, they were not developing a way to speak to deaf