I’m happy to announce that I signed a contract with University of Chicago Press to publish my first book, Hearing Happiness: Fakes, Frauds, and Fads in Deafness Cures. The book explores the history of therapeutic choices and negotiations respecting “deafness cures,” including Eustachian tube catheterization, artificial eardrums, electrical apparatuses, the fenestration operation, and an abundance… Continue Reading
Latest in: History of Deafness
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In May, I took up my position as the 2016 Klemperer Fellow in the History of Medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine. Thanks to the wonderful staff there, especially Arlene Shanter, I was able to dig through the library’s trove of materials on otologists in the 1920s and 1930s and their collaborations with social… Continue Reading
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In 1923, the New York Times and Time Magazine reported that King Alfonso of Spain summoned a famous New York osteopath to treat his fifteen-year-old son, Infante Don Jaime (1908-1975). Deaf and mute following a severe case of mastoiditis (middle-ear infection) and possibly tuberculosis at a young age, Don Jaime was adjudged “incurable” by Spanish… Continue Reading
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On my flight from Toronto to Phoenix last week, I passed the time by reading a series of letters from deaf persons sent to the American Medical Association during the 1930s. I collected the letters from a summer visit to the AMA archives but never had the time to properly examine them. Most of the… Continue Reading
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Two months ago, I was at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., researching through copies of The Hearing Dealer, a trade magazine for dealers and sellers of hearing aids during the 1950s. The magazine is an excellent historical source for examining how dealers went around cultural and legal restrictions for selling hearing aids to… Continue Reading
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“The most difficult form of deafness to diagnose has been deafness in infants,” a March 1954 article in Life magazine declared. So how could physicians or audiologists determine hearing loss in children too young to respond to standard audiometric tests or make use of picture screening tests that require an understanding of primary words? If… Continue Reading
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“Many children have been thought to be mentally very dull when, in fact, they have been partially or severely deaf.” During my research excursion at Gallaudet University Library, I came across a little green book in the stacks, lodged next to a book that was on my list of materials to examine. Curious, I pulled… Continue Reading
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An 1883 article in Scientific American narrated how a New Jersey clergyman’s deaf wife was finally able to hear her husband’s sermons in church with the aid of an apparatus. As illustrated in the engraving, the apparatus connected a series of trumpets underneath the church floor, connecting the preacher’s desk to the pews, so that the wife… Continue Reading
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George H. Wilson (1866-1949) of Louisville, Kentucky, received a patent (U.S. #476,853) for his “rimless [and] self-ventilating” artificial eardrum in 1892. Often referred as “wireless phones for the ears,” the device was made of rubber, designed to be simple in construction and “so shaped that it can be quickly and readily removed and replaced without… Continue Reading
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I’m beginning a new project on the historical contributions of women to otology, many of whom have been overlooked in scholarship. My current article investigates the physiological work of Dr. Phyllis Margaret Tookey Kerridge, who died on June 22, 1940, the only daughter of Mr. William Alfred Tookey of Bromley, Kent. She was educated at… Continue Reading
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It’s an iconic and powerful photo. The face of a young child, born deaf, hearing sounds for the first time. Jack Bradley, photojournalist from the Peoria Journal Star, captured the exact moment a doctor fitted five year old Harold Whittles with an earpiece and turned on the hearing aid. First printed in the February 1974… Continue Reading
From the Hands of Quacks 