In the autumn of 1837 Dr. Howe discovered Laura Bridgman, who had only the one sense of touch remaining in a normal condition; and his remarkable success, in her education made him famous. In connection with her and other pupils he began the process of teaching the deaf to use articulate speech, and all who have followed him in this work have but extended and perfected his methods. While teaching the blind and deaf, Dr. Howe found those who were idiotic; and he began to study this class of persons about 1840, and to devise methods for their education. As a member of the Massachusetts legislature in 1846, he secured the appointment of a commission to investigate the condition of the idiotic; and for this commission he wrote the report. In 1847, the state having made an appropriation for the teaching of idiotic, children, ten of them were taught at the Blind Asylum, under the care of Dr. Howe. In 1851 a separate school was provided for such children. Dr. Howe was called "the Massachusetts philanthropist," but his philanthropy was universal in its humanitarian aims. He gave large and faithful attention, in 1845 and later, to prisons and prisoners; he was a zealous friend of the slave and the freedman; and in 1864 he devoted arduous service to the reform of the state charities of Massachusetts. His biographer justly says of his spirit of universal philanthropy: "He joined in the movement in Boston which abolished imprisonment for debt; he was an early and active member of the Boston Prison Discipline Society, which once did much service; and for years, when interest in prison reform was at a low ebb in Massachusetts, the one forlorn relict of that once powerful organization, a Prisoner's Aid Society, used to hold its meetings in Dr. Howe's spacious chamber in Bromfield Street. He took an early interest in the care of the insane, with which his friends Horace Mann, Dr. Edward Jarvis, and Dorothea Dix were greatly occupied; and in later years he introduced some most useful methods of caring for the insane in Massachusetts. He favored the temperance reform, and wrote much as a physician on the harm done to individuals and to the human stock by the use of alcoholic liquors. He stood with Father Taylor of the Seamen's Bethel in Boston for the salvation of the sailors and their protection from cruel punishments, and he was one of those who almost abolished the flogging of children in schools. During his whole career as a reformer of public schools in New England, Horace Mann had no friend more intimate or helpful than Dr. Howe, nor one whose support was more indispensable to Mann himself."[14]