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First Blind Man to Use a Seeing-Eye Dog Was a Tennessean

By Bill Carey | September 17, 2025

When you see a blind person with a seeing-eye dog, remember that this practice started with a young man from Nashville. In 1927, Morris Frank was a 20-year-old student at Vanderbilt University and unhappy about his dependency on others to get around. Frank’s father read him an article in the Saturday Evening Post by Dorothy Eustis, an American woman living in Switzerland. In the article, Eustis talked about how shepherds there were training dogs to help blind people. She speculated that this practice could be perfected to help blind people on a full-time basis.