• Leigh’s New Picture of London

    On the London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (est. 1792): By this excellent institution, extensive and successful arrangements are made to teach even the deaf and dumb! So long ago as 1653, the celebrated Dr. Wallis first laid down the principles by which the deaf and dumb might be instructed, (Vide the Philosophical Transactions… Continue Reading

  • Historiography of the Market for Health

    Parallel to my research on socio-educational institutions for the deaf, I’m hoping to tie together themes of technological progress, entrepreneurialism and consumerism with the broad and diverse medical community and marketplace—what we can aptly call medical pluralism. There’s been a lot of historical scholarship on the complex dynamics that wove together a diverse group of… Continue Reading

  • Deaf World/Hearing World

    As some of you may have gathered from my Tweets, my paper has been selected for the Deaf World/Hearing World: Spaces, Techniques, and Things in Culture and History Conference to take place on December 10-11 in Berlin. The conference is sponsored by the Max Planck Institute and Project Biocultures at the University of Chicago. The… Continue Reading

  • From comme les monstres to hommes de la nature

    The afternoon of 1799, drew attention to the Théâtre de la République, where just five weeks after Napoleon’s seizure of power, the dramatist Jean-Nicolas Bouilly (1763-1842) was showcasing his new play, L’Abbé de l’Épée. A comedy in five acts, the play dramatized a fictionalized version of the case of the Comte de Solar, a young… Continue Reading

  • Histories of Deaf Histories

    One of the agendas of my dissertation is to build a steady bridge between scholarship from the history of medicine and scholarship from Deaf and Disability Studies. Granted, as part of my education at IHPST, my research has been lopsided, for I’ve concentrated more on the history of medicine and technologies (especially relating to medical… Continue Reading

  • Lives of the Deaf

    From the middle ages until the nineteenth century, the deaf were categorized in the same class as other outcasts—beggars, wanderers, invalids—and portrayed as defective bodies capable of communicating only through crude gestures. Yet, as some scholars have duly noted, the experiences of the deaf were by no means uniform: Saint-Loup argues that the Middle Ages… Continue Reading

  • Off to Leeds!

    I’m headed out to Leeds, UK for the Disability & the Victorians: Confronting Legacies Conference to be held at Leeds-Trinity University College. This should be an interesting conference for me, for it’s the first time I’m presenting a paper to an audience composed of historians and other scholars of deaf and disability studies. I’m really… Continue Reading

  • The Surgeon’s Plan: Tympanic Membrane Perforation

    By the nineteenth century, Sir Astley Paston Cooper (1768-1841), surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, outlined his observation that puncture of the tympanic membrane could be effective in draining out collections of fluid in the middle ear, and hence, improve a particular type of deafness. Cooper’s work was inspired in part by his friend Sir Everard Home… Continue Reading

  • “that deaf stupid man!”

    In 1839, a deaf man, G.H. Bosanquet, published a pamphlet entitled The Sorrows of Deafness, explaining in the preface that his aims for publication were derived from his “having suffered misery…from the privations of deafness.” Writing on behalf of his “fellow-sufferers,” Bosanquet remarks “[t]here is no class of sufferers whose feelings, as far as the results… Continue Reading

  • The Catheter

    Valsalva’s De aure remained one of the standard treatises on the ear and the Valsalva maneuver gained popularity among physicians and surgeons for diagnosing sources of blockages in the ear. The maneuver, however, contained little therapeutic benefits for cases in which there weren’t blockages in the tube or associated parts of the ear; moreover, it… Continue Reading