Anna Gillingham (1878-1963) was an educator and psychologist who worked with Dr. Samuel Orton to publish instructional materials that would later be known as the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction. Gillingham wrote The Gillingham Manual: Remedial Training for Children with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling and Penmanship alongside Bessie Stillman, published in 1935/6.
Gillingham and Stillman developed a “sequential, alphabetic-phonetic multisensory program” that eliminated the need for students to memorize all words in a language. This teaching manual for the “alphabetic method” of Orton-Gillingham combined multisensory techniques with teaching phonics, morphology, fluency, and syntax.