MN90: Helen Keller’s Gall Bladder

Transcript

Welcome to MN90: Minnesota History in 90 Seconds.

1937, Helen Keller, celebrated author and speaker, had just returned from a successful lecture tour of Japan. She hopped a plane to Rochester, Minnesota, for an annual physical at the Mayo Clinic. This was where she discovered that those annoying stomach pains she'd had for the past few years were caused by a diseased gallbladder. Well, she'd just have to have it removed because, above all, she did not want anything getting in the way of her busy schedule of talks and appearances. Blind and deaf for most of her 57 years, Keller didn't let a little operation phase her. She'd been through worse, most recently, the death of her dear teacher, Anne Sullivan, the woman who’d taught her sign language and opened a new world to her. Keller's stay in Rochester was prolonged because of a post-operation infection, but she counted herself lucky. She wrote a friend: “To be here in a sweet, quiet, tree-shaded town....” Hurriedly, she closed the letter when a nurse urged her to get some shut eye. Over the next decades, Helen Keller would return to Mayo many more times for her checkups in between lecture tours and books. She died in 1968.

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