In case you missed it, this past July Collectors’ Weekly writer Lisa Hix interviewed me and Karen Bourrier for her essay, “Healing Spas and Ugly Clubs: How Victorians Taught us to Treat People with Disabilities.” It a great piece, so do check it out! Below is an extract from my interview. Ear trumpets were among the myriad… 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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When I was seven years old, I was placed in a special class for the hard of hearing. The class was in a regular school for elementary and middle school children, and usually held no more than ten students. All of us in the class wore hearing aids, underwent speech therapy, and communicated orally, rather… 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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In the late nineteenth century, deafness was transformed into “Deafness,” shifting from a medical affliction towards a cultural category with its own language offering a unique perspective of the world. At the core of this transformation were educators and pupils at residential schools for the deaf. Educators were retrained in new pedagogical framework, adopting the… Continue Reading
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Sometime in the early 1880s, a man by the name of J.H. Nicholson, who called himself an “aural specialist,” introduced himself to a French doctor by the name of Drouet. Hospitalized for tuberculosis aggravated by alcohol, the doctor was once an obscure general practitioner operating in the tough Belleville district in Paris. It appeared that… Continue Reading
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BOOK REVIEW Joseph M. Gabriel, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). In the 1980s, historians began to refer to the “medical marketplace” as a model for analyzing the experiences of health and illness. Adopting a normative understanding of the… Continue Reading
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Book Review: Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe Edited by Daniel Morat (Berghahn Books, 2014) As a historian who studies the history of deafness, I am fascinated with the experiences and histories of sound and auditory perception. Sounds have become so ubiquitous to daily living that it seems only… Continue Reading
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Institutionalizing the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England By Anna Shepherd Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine 20 Pickering & Chatto, 2014 HB 978 1 84893 431 3: £60/$99 eBook: £24 (incl. VAT) On a prime 150 acre site in Surrey at Woking, Brookwood Asylum opened its doors on June 17, 1867. Established… Continue Reading
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The school bell is no longer a new voice in the wilderness. It is an accept part of the educational system of Ontario. May it continue to ring out its welcome call up the hillsides and through the forest isles of the North for it carries a message of health, hope and power to the… Continue Reading
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In the 1870s, E.B. Meyrowitz, an optician in New York City, established a surgical instrument company. By 1887, the company began manufacturing acoustic aids for the deaf, the most prominent of which was the Otophone*. The device was invented by James A. Maloney, who filed for a patent the same year, for a hearing aid… Continue Reading
From the Hands of Quacks 