Deaf and dumb

“ ANECDOTES & INCIDENTS OF THE DEAF AND DUMB.
W. R. ROE, M. C. T. D. & D.,
Head Master Midland Deaf and Dumb Institution, Derby,
Author Of "Alice Gray: a True Story;" &c.
DERBY: FRANCIS CARTER, IRON GATE.
1886.
PREFACE.
The Deaf and Dumb cannot help themselves as others can. From the cradle they are cut off from their fellow creatures. They can only cry, like the dumb brute, to make their pains and wishes known. God only can know the bitterness of heart, the desolation of the deaf and dumb child of the poor, as it grows up in a world without speech or sound—a lifelong silence! ”

“ On the other hand, in solitude the deaf and dumb has the advantage. All the colour and movement of life is before him, while the blind is not only denied that vision of the outside world, but has a restriction of movement that the other does not share. ”

“ Must we be deaf for ever; never hear
Thy voice proclaiming that relief is near?
Father! our tongues are tied; we cannot speak
Our heart-felt yearnings, howsoe'er we seek.
Our throats swell with the words we fain would say;
In murmurs hoarse and thick they die away.
When will our dumb and dark despair be o'er,
And like a rushing stream our fervent pray'rs outpour? ”

“ And none but those who have drunk the bitter cup to its dregs feel and know its death, death, double death! These afflicted ones die daily and the graves to them seem pleasant and delightful. The sufferings of the deaf and dumb are myths—but a drop in the ocean compared to what I endured! ”

“ To be dumb, of course, is, comparatively speaking, nothing; for most of the perplexities of life come from talk. But to be deaf—to live ever in silence, to see laughing lips moving, to see hands wandering over the keys, to see birds exulting, and be denied the resultant harmonies: that must be terrible. ”

“ In the picture of a blind man we see by the tilt of the chin, the angle of the head, that, like all so afflicted, the man is exercising senses which are dormant in those who have sight. The simple black outline of the American deaf and dumb poet Nack, by this master-cutter, is instinct with the patient silence of the dumb, the aloofness of the deaf. Fine oil paintings and miniatures give us a man or woman interpreted through the senses of the artist and idealised or distorted through the alchemy of the artist’s mind. ”

“ From fearing that the deaf and dumb had hardly any capacities, too many of their friends have come to believe them a sort of sacred, favoured class, gifted with a keener apprehension, a more subtile reason, and a purer spirituality than others, and shut out from little but what would defile and harden their minds. Such a belief may not be expressed in propositions or allowed on a full statement; but much of the conversation on the condition of the class proceeds on such an idea; and, in my own opinion, the education of deaf-mutes is and will be materially impaired by it. ”

“ Thus the visible marks of attention the deaf and dumb receive from others, their caresses, frowns, and smiles, all make a corresponding impression on their tender minds, and as they grow older they watch the looks and gestures of those near them with a keenness unknown to other children, so that the slightest change of expression does not escape their observation. ”

“ Behold these immortal minds!—Some of them are before you; the pledges, we trust, of multitudes who will be rescued from the thraldom of ignorance: pursue, in imagination, their future progress in time, and in eternity, and say, my hearers, whether I appreciate too highly the blessings, which we wish to be made the instruments of conferring upon the deaf and dumb? ”

“ FOREWORD The aim of the present study is to ascertain as far as possible the standing of the deaf, or, as they are so often called, the "deaf and dumb," in society in America, and to examine the treatment that has been accorded to them—to present an account of an element of the population of whom little is generally known. In this effort regard is had not only to the interests of the deaf themselves, but also, with the growing concern in social problems, to the fixing of a status for them in the domain of the social sciences. ”

“ And yet, again, speech itself is a necessity, a necessary instrument, in order to the high development of reason. We have some idea what deaf mutes of our human family are like, when no painstaking and kindly culture has been bestowed on their intelligence, and temper, and affections, and conscience. Let us conceive the whole race of man to be, and to have been from the beginning, not indeed deaf, but congenitally and irreversibly dumb, with no more power of articulate expression than a horse, or let us say, a dog. ”

“ Her baby ten months old, if disturbed in the night, would creep to her and touch her lips, to awaken her, but would make no noise.
One might fancy that all men who have an agonizing sorrow or a fearful secret would be drawn by irresistible attraction into the society of the deaf and dumb. What awful passions might not be whispered, what terror safely spoken, in the charmed circle round yonder silent boat,—a circle whose centre is a human life which has not all the susceptibilities of life, a confessional where even the priest cannot hear! ”

“ Among these men I saw many who were blind, paralysed, deaf, and dumb, and even children;—blind men who would not see the truth; paralytic men who would not advance, according to its directions, on the road leading to eternal live; deaf men who refused to listen to its warnings and threats; dumb men who would never use their voices in its defence ”

“ The following is the answer of Clerc, the other pupil, to the same question:—"He who never had anything has never lost anything, and he who never lost anything has nothing to regret; consequently, the deaf and dumb who never heard or spoke, have never lost either hearing or speech, therefore cannot lament either the one or the other. And he who has nothing to lament cannot be unhappy; consequently the deaf and dumb are not unhappy. ”

“ DEAF AND DUMB. It is a not uncommon supposition that deaf mutes are dumb on account of some vocal or organic defect, whereas the dumbness arises, with very rare exceptions, from the deprivation of hearing caused by some natural or accidental disease. Where partial or total dumbness exists with the sense of hearing perfect, it will be generally found to proceed either from great nervous debility or from some mental derangement, and not, as is often supposed, from some defect in the vocal organs, which in the congenitally deaf, with hardly an exception, are in their normal condition. ”

“ The lame must walk, the public finding crutch; the blind must see with foreign eyes, germane not alien; the deaf must hear with other sense which human science gives; and in his fingers the dumb man finds a tongue, and yet no miracle. ”

“ Now the Deaf and Dumb are, as a rule, exceptionally cheerful and good-tempered. It is quite right, therefore, that exceptions to this rule should be treated in a separate establishment, and that the "Cross Deaf and Dumb" ones should have a house to themselves. ”

“ In our discussion it is with deafness that we are primarily concerned. Deafness and dumbness are, physically, two essentially different things. There is no anatomical connection between the organs of hearing and those of speech; and the structure and functioning of each are such as to preclude any direct pathological relation. The number of the so-called deaf and dumb, moreover, who are really dumb is very small—so small actually as to be negligible. Almost all who are spoken of as deaf and dumb have organs of speech that are quite intact, and are, indeed, constructively perfect. ”

“ You pity the blind man who has never seen the daylight, the deaf who has never heard the harmonies of nature, the dumb who has never found a voice for his soul, and, under a false cloak of shame, you will not pity this blindness of heart, this deafness of soul, this dumbness of conscience, which sets the poor afflicted creature beside herself and makes her, in spite of herself, incapable of seeing what is good, of hearing the Lord, and of speaking the pure language of love and faith. ”

“ The matron at the Margate Asylum, in response to my inquiry on this point, assured me that where one would have the difficulty in getting an ordinary child to have a tooth out, the deaf and dumb will have three or four out, with not so much as a protest. To pull three or four, or even five out at a sitting was indeed a constant practice, until mere humanity compelled her to forbid it. ”

“ In the deaf and dumb the eyes have to answer for both eyes and ears in getting knowledge. They have to do double duty; and they do it very well if the mind is only wide awake and attentive to all that it can learn by the eyes. ”

“ The primary absence of the power of hearing has paralysed the child’s intelligence with special reference to his imitative faculty, and in fact, the person called deaf and dumb is originally simply a person born deaf. ”

“ It has been observed that persons who are deprived any one sense, have additional vigour infused into those that remain. Thus blind persons are distinguished [Pg 48] by exquisite delicacy of touch, and the deaf and dumb concentrate their whole souls in the eye, their only avenue to knowledge. ”

“ The deaf and dumb, if left wholly to themselves, would, in all probability, belong always to the third class, since, with the loss of speech they are simultaneously deprived of a leading condition of rationality. And, accordingly, the first object with those who undertake the difficult task of training these unfortunate beings is to furnish them with another language, by means of signs, instead of the ordinary audible speech of which the accident of birth has deprived them. ”

“ The example of the deaf and dumb, who evidently think, not by associations of sound, but of touch,—using combinations of finger-speech, instead of words, as the symbols of their thought,—appears to show that he might find a partial substitute for his present means of reflection. ”

“ Let them grant to one of the people to adapt the mouths of the dumb for the purposes of speech, to unseal the ears of the deaf, to give the natural powers of the eye to those born without sight, and to restore feeling and life to bodies long cold in death. ”

“ Persons idiotic from birth are incapable of producing any other vocal sounds than inarticulate cries, although supplied with all the internal means of articulation. Persons deaf and dumb are in the same situation, though from a different cause ”

“ But perhaps the school presents none of these sights, but a very different one; a sight half sad, yet not without a ray of gladness; a picture not composed of trained teachers, or boisterous youths, or prattling children, eagerly listening, and as eagerly speaking, but of a group of deaf and dumb. And now, if ever, you may see what intense enthusiasm may be thrown into manual training. The poor unfortunates deprived of hearing and of speech find here a new field in which to exercise their minds and express their ideas. ”

“ If any learned man should have advanced this proposition, that mere human art could give to the deaf man what should be equal to his hearing, and to the dumb man an equivalent for his want of speech, so that he could converse as freely almost as other hearing or talking persons; that he might, though born deaf, be by art taught how to read, write, and understand any language, as well as students that have their hearing, would not the world, and many even of the learned part of it, say that nothing could be more extravagantly wild, more mad and frantic? ”

“ It is to speak to you more conveniently of the deaf and dumb, of those unfortunate beings who, deprived of the sense of hearing and consequently of that of speech, would be condemned all their life, to the most sad vegetation if nobody came to their succor, but who entrusted to our regenerative hands, will pass from the class of brutes to the class of men. ”

“ Many a poor creature, blind from birth or infancy, was gifted with, or restored to excellent sight; the maimed were suddenly cured—the deaf made to hear—the dumb to speak—and the study baccagh, or cripple, bounded away, at the rate of six miles an hour, cursing the whole thing as a bad spec—a dead failure. ”

“ Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s. ”

“ A mother's smile it may understand, but her soothing voice never comforts or delights it. While others grow in love, and life, and intelligence, its heart is chilled and its mind enfeebled. Only under suitable instruction, given at an early age, can the deaf mute become anything but a burden to others and to himself.
The anecdotes in the following pages will doubtless be read with considerable curiosity, and it is hoped that the Midland Institution for the Deaf and Dumb at Derby will receive some pecuniary assistance by the publication of this little book. ”

“ On the other hand, many of these deaf and dumb servants of the temple have families, and apart from their unknown duties seem free to come and go; being dumb, they cannot chatter, and being deaf they cannot listen; and since the native language is purely phonetic and not literary, people so afflicted cannot converse with their fingers, as is the case with our deaf-mutes on Earth. ”

“ Then there are your three idiots, who, harmless though they may be, ought never to be allowed to go roaming about the country, frightening children into fits, and disgusting every one who has not a fellow-feeling for the ‘naturals.’ That deaf and dumb girl you encourage is a perfect nuisance to the neighbourhood, making believe to tell fortunes and to prophesy, in her hideous gibberish, good or evil. ”

“ The deaf and dumb child finds himself in a world of fearful stillness—one everlasting silence, through which comes no word to explain anything. He must learn to talk on his fingers, that a certain set of signals is this thing and another that thing. Always he has to be not only told of a thing, but to be shown it, or shown how it is done. When he has learned to talk on his fingers, and mastered the alphabet, the teachers at Darlington commence on the task of teaching him to read what people say by the movements of their lips, and to articulate in return in n voice that he himself cannot hear. ”