Overlooked No More: Bessie Blount, Nurse, Wartime Inventor and Handwriting Expert
Last edited Sun Apr 19, 2020, 09:54 AM - Edit history (1)
Overlooked No More: Bessie Blount, Nurse, Wartime Inventor and Handwriting Expert
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/obituaries/bessie-blount-overlooked.html
Blount invented a feeding device and taught amputee veterans to write with their teeth and their feet. She later became a forensic handwriting analyst.
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Bessie Blount in 1958 helping a disabled war veteran write with his feet. She later invented a feeding device to help veterans become self-sufficient.CreditCreditElmira Star-Gazette/Elmira Advertiser
March 27, 2019
Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
By Amisha Padnani
Bessie Blount was about 7 when a teacher rapped her knuckles during a classroom assignment. The blow stung her, the reason even more so.
“For writing with my left hand!” Blount told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2008, still incredulous more than 85 years later.
So she taught herself to write with her teeth and her toes, figuring, “If it was wrong to write with my left hand, then it was wrong to write with my right hand.”
She never finished her museum. She died the next year, on Dec. 30, 2009. She was 95.
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Thanks for sharing these details about her. 