• Diagnosing Deafness by Perspiration

    “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

  • Letters from Philadelphia

    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

  • Auricular Training & The Little Deaf Child

    I came across a copy of The Little Deaf Child: A Book for Parents, a short book published in 1928 reassuring parents of deaf children that with proper training and education, there was hope for their children. The book was written by John Dutton Wright (1866-1952), the founder and director of the Wright Oral School in New… Continue Reading

  • Wilson’s Common Sense Ear Drums

    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

  • A Census of the Deaf

    Sir William Robert Wilde (1815-1876) was one of the most notable aural surgeons during the second half of the nineteenth-century. He made numerous to aural surgery, including tables on the hereditary basis of deafness and newer hearing tests to determine degrees of hearing loss. Wilde also made extensive use of statistics in his writing, using… Continue Reading

  • The “Popular Prejudice”

    Throughout my research of nineteenth century works on aural surgery, as well as works on deafness and education for the deaf, I’ve come across the phrase “popular prejudice” often enough to warrant some analysis. The phrase reflects two crucial aspects of how deafness was perceived as a social image: Firstly, deaf-mutes were constructed as social… 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

  • “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