Howe, SAMUEL GRIDLEY, M.D.

Howe, SAMUEL GRIDLEY, M.D., an American philanthropist, was born in Boston, November 10, 1801, and graduated at Brown University in 1821, and at the Harvard medical school in 1824. He served as a surgeon during the Greek war of independence from 1824 to 1827, organising the medical staff of the Greek army. He then went to America to raise contributions, and, returning with food, clothing, and supplies, formed a colony on the isthmus of Corinth. Swamp-fever, however, drove him from the country in 1830. In 1831 he went to Paris to study the methods of educating the blind, and, having become mixed up in the Polish insurrection, spent six weeks in a Prussian prison. On his return to Boston he established a school for the blind, his most famous pupil being Laura Bridgman (q.v.). He also established a school for the training of idiots. In 1851-53, assisted by his wife, he edited the anti-slavery Commonwealth, and, after revisiting Greece in 1867 with supplies for the Cretans, he edited in Boston The Cretan. He died 9th January 1876.—His wife, JULIA WARD HOWE, born in New York city, 27th May 1819, became prominent in the woman-suffrage movement since 1869, preached in American Unitarian pulpits, and published, besides narratives of travel and a Life of Margaret Fuller, several volumes of poems, Passion Flowers (1854), Words for the Hour (1857), and Later Lyrics (1866), the last the best. In 1861 she wrote the 'Battle-hymn of the Republic.'