Helen Keller is best known as a person with deaf blindness a disability that seems

pretty terrifying to most people the idea of being unable to either see or hear anything would seem to make it impossible to accomplish anything in life.

And yet that's just what countless deaf blind people do.

Today we're going to examine the claim made by some

that for Helen Keller to have done what she did,

and by extension for other people with deaf blindness

to do what they do would be impossible.

That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

Helen Keller on trial.

Welcome to the show that separates facts from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.

Helen Keller was a very real person.

She was born in 1880 and lost her sight and her hearing

following an illness, probably meningitis,

when she was 19 months old.

Nevertheless, she learned to read, write, and speak, and became an author, an advocate for the

disabled, and as one of the world's most famous people was highly in demand as a public speaker.

So it may surprise you to learn that there is a subculture of Helen Keller Truthers, people who don't

believe that she was actually blind or deaf, or even that she existed at all.

Yes, if you can imagine it, you can probably find it on the internet.

Young Helen and her family's cook's daughter learned a few dozen hand signs between themselves,

but beyond this, few had any insight into the girl's mind.

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