Medical and technological limits: exploiting, evaluating and alleviating adult hearing loss in Britain up to the Great War.
While early 19th century otologists claimed they could ‘cure’ most categories of deafness, by the early twentieth century such boasts were more characteristic of opportunist mail order advertisers. Victorian middle class people who experienced significant auditory loss in adulthood could thus not expect much assistance from physicians in attempting to sustain life among the hearing. Some followed Harriet Martineau’s example and declared their ‘deafness’ publicly by sporting a hearing trumpet to aid conversation. The more self-conscious opted for hearing assistance discreetly disguised in, for example, a ladies’ bonnet or a gentleman’s top hat. Those untroubled by myopia could instead learn lip-reading, or occasionally hand signing. These purported ‘solutions’ to hearing loss were much debated alongside many other aspects of deafness in the Deaf Chronicle founded in 1889, and in its successor periodicals.
Date: 17 February 2016, 17:30
Venue: St Anne's College, Woodstock Road OX2 6HS
Venue Details: Seminar Room 3
Speaker: Graeme Gooday (Professor of History of Science and Technology, University of Leeds)
Part of: Science, Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Laura Spence