Bessie Blount was about 7 when a teacher rapped her knuckles during a classroom assignment. The blow stung her, the reason even more so.

“For writing with my left hand!” Blount told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2008, still incredulous more than 85 years later.

So she taught herself to write with her teeth and her toes, figuring, “If it was wrong to write with my left hand, then it was wrong to write with my right hand.”

That act of defiance — along with her inventiveness — would serve her throughout an eclectic international career, as a nurse, physical therapist, wartime inventor and forensic handwriting and document analyst. With each of these moves she had to overcome the obstacles facing a black woman in the job, although she resisted being defined by her race.

Bessie Griffin was born into meager circumstances on Nov. 24, 1914, in rural Virginia to George Woodard and Mary Elizabeth Griffin. She later took on her grandmother’s last name, Blount. She studied at Diggs Chapel Elementary School in Hickory, Va. (now Chesapeake), near Norfolk. The school had been built after the Civil War by the black community to educate the children of former slaves.

“When I attended the school, black kids didn’t have textbooks,” she told The Pilot. “We later got them from the white schools. But each child would read a verse out of the Bible. That’s how we first learned to read.”

Her family later settled in New Jersey, where she studied nursing at Kenney Memorial Hospital in Newark, said her son, Philip Griffin. The hospital had been founded by Booker T. Washington’s physician, John A. Kenney Sr., after he moved to the area and found that hospitals would not hire black doctors.

She went on to study physical therapy at Union Junior College, now Union County College, and Panzer College of Physical Education and Hygiene, now part of Montclair State University, all in New Jersey. She eventually became a licensed physiotherapist and took a job at Bronx Hospital (now Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center).

Many of her patients were World War II veterans who had lost their arms after undergoing amputations, and Blount taught them to write with their teeth and feet.

“You’re not crippled, only crippled in your mind,” she would tell them.

A doctor at Bronx Hospital then suggested, “If you really want to do something to help these boys, why don’t you make something by which they can feed themselves,” The Afro-American newspaper wrote in 1951.

She responded, “I’ll do that, too.”

Blount spent 10 months developing her first design of what she called an “invalid feeder.” Her workshop was her kitchen, and her materials were plastic, a file, an ice pick, a hammer, dishes and boiling water to melt the plastic into a mold.

“I usually worked from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m.,” she told The Afro-American in 1948.

That year she received a patent for part of the design, with a description of what she planned to include in a later version.

She then spent about four years and $3,000 making improvements and ultimately created a working model made of stainless steel, which she demonstrated at a New Jersey hospital. The audience gave her a standing ovation.

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Amisha (Amy) Padnani is an editor on the Obituaries desk and the creator of Overlooked, a series that tells the stories of remarkable people whose deaths were not originally reported on by The New York Times. Before joining The Times in 2011, she worked as a reporter and digital editor for several New York City-area newspapers.