Elizabeth Helm Nitchie

Elizabeth Logan Helm Nitchie (May 2, 1880 – February 16, 1961) was an American educator and expert on lip reading.

Early life and education Elizabeth Helm was born in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, the daughter of William Logan Helm and Florence Murray Helm. Her father died when she was a little girl. She was from the same extended family as John L. Helm, governor of Kentucky, and Benjamin Hardin Helm, a Confederate Army general during the American Civil War. (Her grandfather Henry Benjamin Helm was the first cousin of the governor.)

Career Nitchie worked as a stenographer as a young woman. In 1917, Nitchie succeeded her late husband as principal of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing, later known as the Nitchie School of Lip-Reading, in New York City. She frequently spoke and wrote about lip-reading in the 1920s and 1930s. "My own greatest handicap in teaching lip reading to the deaf is that I myself have normal hearing," she told a Brooklyn Daily Eagle interviewer in 1927. "All my teachers are either totally or partially deaf, and the general feeling is that only a deaf person can understand the attitude of the deaf and be a successful teacher." She retired from running the school in 1928. New Lessons in Lip reading (1950) Lip-reading Principles and Practice (1930, new edition, revised with Gertrude Torrey)

Personal life Elizabeth Logan Helm married in 1908. They had a son, Edward Jr. Her husband, who was deaf, died in 1917, Her grave is in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.