DEAF AND DUMB 



1718 



DEAF AND DUMB 



DEAF AND DUMB, or DEAF-MUTES, are 

 those persons who can neither hear nor speak. 

 Those who are born deaf or become so in 

 infancy suffer from the additional affliction of 

 dumbness because they cannot hear others 

 speak, and therefore do not learn to articulate 

 words. Mutes of this class are to be dis- 

 tinguished from those whose lack of speech 

 results from defects of the speech centers in 

 the brain, or from imperfect organs of articula- 

 tion. When deafness comes upon those who 

 have already learned to talk they retain the 

 power of speech, though the voice often be- 

 comes harsh and unnatural. Mutes who are 

 taught to articulate words do not acquire a 

 perfectly-natural speaking voice, the rising and 

 falling inflections which give variety to the 

 speech being more or less absent. 



Causes of Deafness. The deaf are grouped 

 into two classes those who are born deaf and 

 those who lose their hearing after birth. The 

 former are afflicted with what is called con- 

 genital deafness, or deafness from birth; the 

 latter with accidental, or acquired, deafness. 

 In the first case the harm is done before the 

 birth of "the child, who suffers from what is 

 known as arrested development. In some in- 

 stances, physicians agree, this condition exists 

 as a family trait, due to alcoholism, insanity 

 or certain forms of disease, notably syphilis, 

 and the deafness is transmitted by heredity. 

 The intermarriage of near relatives, who in- 

 herit similar tendencies to disease, is a very 

 common cause of deafness at birth. It is esti- 

 mated that about twenty-five per cent of the 

 deaf-mutes of France and ten per cent of those 

 in the United States, Canada and England are 

 the children of near-related parents. 



Acquired deafness, which occurs at all ages, 

 may be permanent or temporary, partial or 

 complete. Sometimes only one ear is affected, 

 in which case the person is not seriously handi- 

 capped. Acquired deafness is often a process 

 of slow development, the hearing failing grad- 

 ually and perhaps never ceasing wholly, though 

 the sufferer may hear with difficulty. 



These varying conditions are due chiefly to 

 (a) deposits of wax in the ear, which touch 

 the membrane of the drum; (b) inflammation 

 of the lining membrane of the canals (Eusta- 

 chian tubes) that lead from the upper part of 

 the throat to the middle ear (see EAR, subhead 

 Middle Ear) ; (c) piercing of the drum mem- 

 brane; (d) disease of the middle ear, causing 

 the joints of the small bones of the ear (os- 

 sicles) to stiffen and interfering with their 



movements; (e) disease of the auditory nerve 

 or of the brain, whereby some of the auditory 

 centers are affected; (/) other diseases, such as 

 spinal meningitis, scarlet fever, measles or 

 mumps, which affect the middle ear. Some- 

 times a violent blow upon the ear causes deaf- 

 ness by rupturing the drum, and a constant 

 noise, as that in a machine shop or the inces- 

 sant roar of battle, may produce loss of hear- 

 ing by overstimulating the auditory nerve. 



The Education of Deaf -Mutes. Historical. 

 Shut in within himself and unable to com- 

 municate freely with his fellows, the deaf-mute 

 of early historical times was a pitiable object, 

 considered by the law to have no more intelli- 

 gence than a madman. The Greeks and Ro- 

 mans put their deaf-mutes out of the way as 

 so many useless encumbrances, and in France 

 the parents of these unfortunates regarded 

 them as a family disgrace and shut them up in 

 convents and asylums. It would seem that 

 Christ was the first to have compassion on 

 these defectives, for among His works of mercy 

 were the opening of the ears of the deaf and 

 the loosening of the tongues of the dumb. 



Probably the first person who attempted to 

 educate the deaf was an English bishop of the 



DEAF AND DUMB ALPHABET 

 For one hand. 



seventh century, who, according to a story 

 told by the Venerable Bede, performed a mir- 

 acle by teaching a deaf-mute to talk. Then, 

 after a lapse of many centuries, an Italian 

 philosopher, Jerome Cardan (1501-1576), 



