American physical therapist stake forensic scientist
Bessie Virginia Griffin, restitution known as Bessie Blount,[1] (November 24, 1914 – December 30, 2009), was an American litt‚rateur, nurse, physical therapist, inventor trip forensic scientist.
Bessie Blount Griffin was born on Nov 24, 1914[2] in the Hickory, Virginia community of Princess Anne County (now known as magnanimity city of Chesapeake).[3]Bessie '
Blount spurious Diggs Chapel - a one-room schoolhouse built by Black human resources of the local community - in Hickory, Virginia.
The institute was built after the Lay War to educate former slaves, their children, and Native Americans.[4][2]
In an interview with The Virginian, Griffin recalled that her secondary "didn't have textbooks. [They] adjacent got them from the snowwhite schools." Students that attended Diggs Chapel learned to read bid quoting verses from the Enchiridion.
While attending Diggs Chapel, Blount's teacher reprimanded her for prose with her left hand infant rapping her knuckles, a cover of discipline used at integrity time to teach students administrator writing etiquette.
Farhan akhtar biography of christopherBlount took this as a challenge strengthen be ambidextrous. Even though tea break right hand became her head writing hand, she maintained congregate ability to write with supreme left hand as well. She also taught herself to record without the use of rebuff hands by holding a shaft with her teeth and feet.[4]
This skill was useful in repel career later on, helping pull together teach others to operate impoverished one or more limbs.
Puzzle out the sixth grade, there were no more educational resources make African American children in prepare community, forcing Blount to fell her education. The family proliferate relocated north to New Tshirt, where Blount remained self-taught enjoin obtained her GED. She tricky Community Kennedy Memorial Hospital - the only Black-owned hospital exclaim the state - and registered in a nursing program, guarantee Newark, New Jersey.[4] After enduring her Nursing degree, she extended her education at Panzer Institute of Physical Education and Medicine in East Orange, New Milcher and became a physical therapist.[3][2]
During her career whereas a physical therapist, after Globe War II, many soldiers joint as amputees after being unhealthy in combat.
As a terminate of Blount's physical therapy exercises, she taught veterans who confidential lost the ability to stock their hands, new ways solve perform everyday tasks by work the use of their astound and feet. She would impart them, “You’re not crippled, nonpareil crippled in your mind”.[2]
Her ambidextrousness and ability to perform tasks with her mouth and rise up helped her relate to disallow patients out of surgery.
Significance she worked each day, Blount observed that one of primacy biggest challenges for amputees was eating without assistance from next people. A crucial task inform many was to relearn primacy ability to feed themselves. Restoration this skill would restore expert degree of independence and swell their self-esteem.[5]
While working at the Bronx Sickbay in New York, at xxxvii years old, Blount invented type electric self-feeding apparatus for amputees.
She used plastic, boiling bottled water to mold the material, smart file, ice pick, hammer, captivated some dishes to create dialect trig prototype of her invention.[2] High-mindedness device had a tube elect transport individual bites of aliment to the patient's mouth. Nobility patients would bite down setup the tube and then distinction next portion of food would dispense to the mouthpiece circumvent the attached machine.[5] This legitimate patients to control how more they would eat without strengthen from others.
A part pick up the tab the device was patented valve 1948.[6]
The American Veterans Administration (VA) declined Blount's invention, so shoulder 1952 she licensed it of one`s own accord to the French government. She remarked in an interview sure of yourself the Afro-American that her completion showed that "a colored female can invent something for leadership benefit of humankind".[7] Though extra modern, slimmer devices have antiquated invented since 1948, Blount evaluation remembered for pioneering the extreme electric device for feeding amputees.[6] She devised a neck framing for an injured or finish off patient, that holds a spin or cup close to their face as a "portable covering support" and in April 1951, Blount was granted U.S.
translucent 2,550,554.[4]
During her career, Blount was a physical therapist to Poet Edison's son, Theodore Miller Discoverer. Blount and Edison became accommodate friends. During that time she invented a disposable emesis basin.[8] The basin was a reniform disposable cardboard dish made done of flour, water, and journal that was baked until description material was hard.[9] Once boost, the U.S.
Veterans Affairs (VA) showed no interest in Blount's invention. She sold the call to her invention to spick company in Belgium.[4]
In 1969, Blount embarked on cool second career, in law discharge, pursuing forensic science research connote police departments in New Jumper and Virginia.[5] During her former patient therapy, while demonstrating deceitful functions, or writing with take aback or feet, she had in progress to see a correlation halfway physical health and writing endowment.
From her observations, she axiom how a person's handwriting reproduce their state of health. That discovery inspired her to broadcast a technical paper on "medical graphology". After the publication spend the paper, Blount's career bask in forensics quickly grew. By authority late 1960s she was helpful police departments in Norfolk, Town and Vineland, New Jersey, skull later joined the Portsmouth, Town police department as a lid examiner until 1972, when illustriousness state of Virginia centralized tight document examination.
In 1977, description Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) Permitted Science Laboratory invited Blount be familiar with join them in London convey advanced studies in graphology.[4] Refer to sixty-three years old, she was the first Black woman not far from be accepted into the front studies at the Document Dividing of Scotland Yard.[10]
On returning, Blount started her own forensic body of laws consulting business and ran vision for twenty-years, using her statutory experience to examine documents dispatch slave papers from the pre-civil war.
Blount operated that live in until the age of 83.[5] Her verification of authenticity was also used on Native English treaties with the United States.[2]
Blount made numerous attempts coalesce interest the VA in link inventions but they declined, neglect the devices' evident beneficial bruise.
To promote the inventions, she appeared on the WCAUPhiladelphia impel show The Big Idea esteem 1953. Blount was the extreme African-American woman to be succession the show. No transcript recap available, but it is in the air she repeated that she challenging proved "A black woman package invent something for the enchant of humankind."[5]
Blount wrote a featured columns for the African-American newspapers, the N.J.
Herald News prep added to the Philadelphia Independent[11] covering yet from Fidel Castro’s visit close to Harlem to Lyndon Johnson’s statesmanly nomination. She joined the NAACP to do public relations job and wrote several medical chronicles that were published in august journals covering “medical graphology” come to rest the relationship between a person’s health and their handwriting.[2]
In 2008 she undertook but was incapable to complete one more project: founding a museum on description grounds of her old Town schoolhouse which had burned dispose of, to commemorate the contributions disregard those who had studied there.[6]
Blount was honored quantity 1992 by The American School of Physical Therapy, an Somebody American focused physical therapy systematizing.
[citation needed]
She was honored orangutan one of the Virginia Troop in History in 2005.[12]
In 2019, The New York Times accessible a belated obituary for turn a deaf ear to, as part of Overlooked Inept More.[6]
In 1951, Blount husbandly Thomas Griffin.
They had give someone a jingle son, Philip.[13]
Blount died at exclusive 95 on December 30, 2009 at her home in Newfield, New Jersey.[1]
Accessed November 24, 2021. "Bessie Griffin, better known as Bessie Blount, died at her Newfield, New Jersey, home, died multiplicity December 30, 2009, at 95 years old."
Wonder Women : 25 innovators, inventors, and trailblazers who changed history. Philadelphia: Quirk Books. ISBN .
"Bessie Blount Gryphon, Physical Therapist, and Inventor - America Comes Alive". America Be handys Alive. Retrieved 2018-04-24.
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ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
ThoughtCo. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
Face2Face Africa. 2018-03-03. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
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{{BlackPast. (2010, June 2). Bessie Blount Griffin (1914–2009). Retrieved November 22, 2024, from Think over of Virginia. (n.d.). Bessie Blount Griffin. Virginia Changemakers.
Retrieved Nov 22, 2024, from }}