182 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



DEAF, BUT NOT DUMB. 



By B. ST. JOHN ACKERS. 



TTTHY am I standing before you to-night? 

 VV Why am I reading this paper on the 

 " deaf and dumb " before your honorable Socie- 

 ty ? Not as a schoolmaster wishing to bring be- 

 fore your notice some special method of teaching 

 that he himself invented ; not as a medical man 

 •wishing to advocate some special treatment of 

 ear-diseases; not because, in fact, I have any 

 claim to speak in my own person as a professional 

 practitioner, either scholastic or medical, but 

 solely because that has happened to me which 

 might happen to any one here present : illness 

 came upon my only child ; its life was spared, 

 but its hearing lost. 



Great, indeed, were the difficulties we expe- 

 rienced in deciding on the best way of educating 

 our child ; meagre, indeed, the help we could ob- 

 tain in our own country. I am desirous that 

 others should have the benefit of our experience, 

 so that no one need go through the terrible un- 

 certainty and anxiety we had to endure. Our 

 child was three months old when a severe attack 

 of fever took away her hearing. For a year or 

 two we kept hoping on. I even refused to enter 

 the child in the census as " deaf and dumb." I 

 would not " brand " it as long as there was any 

 doubt. Such was my foolish pride; such is the 

 foolish pride, alas ! of very many ; and it is men- 

 tioned here in order to show that this, among 

 other causes, makes the census-returns of the 

 " deaf and dumb " below the real number. As 

 soon as our child's loss of hearing was beyond 

 question, we brought her here to London for the 

 best medical, surgical, and educational advice. 

 We hoped — indeed, we never doubted — that we 

 should have received the best advice about the 

 education of our child from those of the medical 

 profession whom we consulted. But such was 

 not the case. Sad and disappointed, we turned 

 to those who had devoted their lives to the edu- 

 cation of the deaf. Here, at least, we expected 

 to be assured beyond doubt of the best method 

 on which to instruct her; but again we were 

 doomed to utter disappointment. We found dif- 

 ferent systems at work, and the advocates of each 

 said very hard and bitter things of one another. 

 Here it will be well to explain the technical terms 

 that will be used in this paper. For want of this, 

 it is sometimes difficult to understand the mean- 

 ing of many works on this subject, as different 



terms are used by various writers and speakers 

 to express the same things, and the same terms 

 to express different things. 



"Deaf and Dumb." Those wholly uneducat- 

 ed, or who cannot hear or speak, though edu- 

 cated, or partially so. 



"Deaf." Those who cannot hear or speak 

 before they have been educated, or who, having 

 been educated, are still without hearing, but can 

 speak. 



" German " System. That which is based on 

 articulation and lip-reading. 



" French " System. That which is based on 

 a system of signs. 



" Signs." All, except 



"Natural Signs;" which I define as such as 

 hearing persons use and can understand — e. g., 

 " come," beckoning with the hand ; " go," mo- 

 tioning away with the hand — which are really 

 actions, not signs. 



You may wonder why we did not test for our- 

 selves the results obtained by the various meth- 

 ods in this country. We would willingly have 

 done so, but the " German " system had not been 

 long enough at work to prove the value of its 

 teaching to pupils in general after leaving school, 

 and we were assured by the " French " system 

 teachers — the " old " system, as it is so often er- 

 roneously called by Englishmen, simply because 

 in this country it has been the longer established 

 — that, however good the "German" might ap- 

 pear in school, the speech and lip-reading there 

 learned were of no value in after-life. 



We could not disprove this assertion. Nay, 

 we were inclined to believe it, for, we said to 

 ourselves, as so many do now, "if it be the bet- 

 ter method, surely it would have been adopted 

 by such a practical nation as our own long ago." 

 Of this I must speak hereafter. 



It will be seen that, to persons considering 

 this subject for the first lime, as we were, it was 

 impossible to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion 

 — one that would leave no doubt on their minds 

 — without going into the world to find out the 

 truth. So, without loss of time, in August, 18*72, 

 our child being three years old, we left her with 

 my wife's family, and commenced investigation 

 for ourselves. We visited some of the principal 

 schools in each of the following countries, in the 

 order named : England, United States, Canada, 



