Deafness and mutism

“ Of that form of deafness in which neither consanguineous marriages nor antecedent deafness is involved, we are at present, as we have noted, able to say little definitely. In most cases we may be convinced that there exists in the parent some peculiar state of morbidity or other affection, latent or manifest, perhaps to some extent of hereditary influence, which has an effect on the organs of hearing of the offspring. A certain proportion is quite possibly due to recognizable defects both of physical and mental character. ”

“ The vital statistics show that consanguineous marriages are a large factor in deaf-muteism; about ten per cent., it is estimated, of the deaf-mutes are the offspring of parents related by blood. Ancestral defects are not always perpetuated in kind; they may descend in physical deformity, in deafness, in imbecility. Deafness is more apt to descend in collateral branches than in a straight line. ”

“ In the open air the hearing is better than in a confined situation; in a noisy, than in a quiet society; in a coach when it is in motion, than when it is still. A pulsation is often felt in the ear; a noise resembling sometimes the roaring of the sea, and at others the ringing of distant bells is heard. This deafness generally begins with a diminished secretion of the wax of the ear, which the patient attributes to cold. ”

“ This observation may throw some light on the medical treatment of deaf people; as it may be learnt from their dreams whether the auditory nerve be paralytic, or their deafness be owing to some defect of the external organ. ”

“ That difficulty has its ground in the unwillingness of parents to admit that their children -were born deaf. Their deafness is often attributed to some infantile disease, though the defect is congenital. On the other hand, when they have lost the sense of hearing at an early age, they may be included among the congenitally deaf. But all institutions for the deaf and dumb contain instances which illustrate scientific investigations, and establish the position that such causes as those now alluded to tend to induce and perpetuate the disease of deafness. ”

“ Or a man whose ears have drunk in music bear deafness? Deafness and blindness of heart would be his portion in that part of life when most he needed ear and eye—deafness and blindness after having come to understand the melody of a happy home, and see the beauty of a child-encircled hearth. ”

“ The table shows that, among 5,823 deaf-mutes taken from different parts of the country, 1,719, or 291⁄2 per cent, are known to have had deaf-mute relatives, and that this is due to the influence of heredity is well shown when we contrast those who were born deaf with those who had afterward lost their hearing. Many of those who lose their hearing by accident or disease have no hereditary tendency to deafness, but a considerable number of those who lose their hearing at some time after birth are born with an hereditary predisposition to deafness. ”

“ The crashing noise, combined with the air current, strikes one so stinging a blow when the first “whip” comes, that he feels as though he had been boxed by the hand of an unscen giant, and, unless the ears are protected by special ear mufflers, total deafness will result. ”

“ The causes assigned for congenital deafness are consanguineous marriages, hereditary transmission, weak constitutions of parents, scrofula, climate, and the ill-health of the mother at a certain period of life. There is necessarily difficulty in ascertaining the real cause of deaf ness. ”

“ By this means, deaf mutes are able to distinguish the sounds of speech and reproduce them, although they do not hear them. By close study and long practice they learn to distinguish the most delicate shades of sound. ”

“ As the French word sourd primarily means one who is deaf, we get a curious parallelism of ideas between the salamander deaf to all sense of pity, and insensible to all but its own fell purpose, and the old idea of the deafness of the poisonous adder. “Deaf as an adder” is a common country saying, and the passage in the Psalms of David where we read that “the deaf adder stoppeth her ears, and will not heed the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely,” naturally rises to one’s mind. ”

“ Even the strange case appears in which, L M being impracticable, syllables are more easily repeated than simple sounds.
If a is interrupted before the acquirement of speech, and thus chronic deafness is present in very early childhood, articulation may still be learned through visual and tactile impressions; but in this case the sound-center L is not developed. Another, a sound-touch-center, comes in its place in deaf-mutes when they are instructed, chiefly through the tactile sensations of the tongue ”

“ As sound was for him before his deafness the perceptible form in which the cause of a movement was draped, objects moved without sound seemed to be being moved also without cause; deprived of all resonant quality, they shew a spontaneous activity, seem to be alive. They move, halt, become alight of their own accord. ”

“ In the latter case we are called upon to examine some of the great problems involved in the study of heredity, especially in respect to the extent that the offspring is affected by defects or abnormalities of the parent, and to see what, if any, means are at hand to alter conditions that bring about this form of deafness. We shall first discuss the causes of adventitious deafness, together [17] with the possibilities of its prevention and the likelihood of its diminution, and then consider the questions involved in congenital deafness. ”

“ Those born deaf are precisely the ones that show plainly how necessary hearing is for the acquirement of perfectly articulate speech. One who is deaf from birth does not even learn to speak half a dozen sounds correctly without assistance, and the loss of speech that regularly follows deafness coming on in children who have already learned to speak, shows how inseparably the learning and the development of perfect articulation are bound up with the hearing. Even the deafness that comes on in maturer years injures essentially the agreeable tone, often also the intelligibility, of the utterance. ”

“ In the outlook there is, on the whole, promise, both in respect to the treatment of deafness itself and of the diseases that lead to deafness, though it cannot be said in any sense that any large or general relief is at present in sight. ”

“ Causes of Impairment of Hearing.—The majority of the affections of the middle ear originate from extensions of catarrhal inflammations, from the nose and throat, through the Eustachian tubes. In children adenoids are the most frequent cause of deafness. The so-called hereditary deafness is probably due to an inherited configuration of the septum of the nose, a bending of the septum to one side, or a tendency to catarrhal affections of its mucous membranes. ”

“ And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he said, inter lacrimas et luctum.
The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of this giant soul against his doom ”

“ In general, in respect to the influences of heredity upon deafness, the main determinants seem to be found in the existence in the parties, whether hearing or deaf, of deaf relatives, and, to a less extent, in the existence in parties who are deaf of congenital deafness. ”

“ The most common disorder to which these organs are liable, is Deafness. Having already treated of that malady, we cannot avoid animadverting on the impropriety of employing the common ear-trumpets, which, though they may afford temporary aid, ultimately destroy that useful sense. ”

“ We may perhaps best approach the problem of deafness as an increasing or decreasing phenomenon in the population, if we think of the deaf as composed of two great classes: those adventitiously deaf, that is, those who have lost their hearing by some disease or accident occurring after birth, and those congenitally deaf, that is, those who have never had hearing. ”

“ I imagine there are some ideas of ridicule attached to them.”
“Perhaps so,” replied Charles; “but such associations are false, and ought to be broken through. Blindness is frequently made interesting in books: deafness seldom or never. There are interesting and poetical associations connected with blindness; ridiculous, low, or common ones only with deafness. A blind heroine is charming; but would not all the world laugh at the very idea of a deaf one? ”

“ It is thought that different cells respond to tones of different pitch, but exactly how this is accomplished is not known.
Deafness may result from failure of the sensitive inner ear to respond, or from poor transmission of vibrations across the middle ear by the chain of bones, or by interference with the freedom of action of the eardrum, or by preventing the air waves from striking upon the drum. Injury to the inner ear is rare, because of its secure position within the bone. ”

“ Children superbly allow themselves to become deaf, so to speak, to undesirable circumstances; most frequently, of course, to undesirable circumstances in the way of parental direction; so that fathers, mothers, nurses, or governesses, not comprehending that this mental deafness is for the time being entirely genuine, are liable to hoarseness both of throat and temper. ”

“ The few accounts of such dreams that I have met with, fail to give the age at which deafness set in; in one case, however, in which deafness occurred at thirty years, the pantomimic had replaced the spoken language in the dreams of thirty years later. Similarly, cripples dream of their lost limbs for many years after their loss; in such cases, however, stimulation of the cut nerves may be the suggestive cause of such dreams. A man of forty, who lost his right arm seventeen years before, still dreams of having the arm. ”

“ Upon general principles, since deformities of the head, face, jaws, nose, antra, vaults, &c., are common in neurotics and degenerates, stigmata of the ear-bones must occasionally take place. From the complicated structure of the ear, lesions must often result from such deformities. The deaf-mutism here considered is the result of congenital conditions not produced by disease. Dumbness may result from congenital defects of the tongue or deformities of the larynx of an atavistic or a degenerate type, but degeneracy rarely extends so deeply into the organism as in the case of deaf-mutism. ”

“ A common form of deafness is the result of hardening of the connections between the ear bones, so that the chain no longer follows well the vibrations of the drum. This usually begins to come on during the twenties or thirties, and causes almost complete deafness by the age of fifty. ”

“ Whether deaf-muteness dates from birth or from some accident, it has been proved in the present day that the vocal apparatus of the deaf-mute and that of a speaking person are with rare exceptions equally well organised. ”

“ Complete bilateral deafness. This is practically never organic; complete bilateral deafness is a phenomenon either of traumatic hysteria or of simulation. Sundry methods of surprising the patient into hearing have been adopted. The practice of teaching lip-reading to simulators and hysterics has led to some difficulties in diagnosis, but tests have been produced by Gosset (of one sound with the lips set to form another, and the like) which are of service. ”

“ For in word deafness the patient finds himself, in regard to his own language, in the same position as we all are when we hear an unknown tongue. He has generally preserved intact his sense of hearing, but he has no understanding of the words spoken to him, and is frequently even unable to distinguish them. The explanation generally given of the disease is that the auditory recollection of words has been destroyed in the cortex, or that a lesion, sometimes transcortical, sometimes sub-cortical, hinders the auditive memory from evoking the idea, or the perception from uniting with the memory. ”

“ I had secretly arrived at the conclusion that my deafness was increasing, and that my friends knew it and were concealing it from me. Determined to put my suspicions to the test, I took long solitary walks in the neighborhood of my country home, and tried to hear the new sounds about me. ”

“ Stroud Street, Dover, the first application of which gives immediate relief, restoring the hearing in the most confirmed stages of deafness, whether from old age, nervousness, or any predisposing cause, to which children and adults are subject, and from which deafness follows the heavy affliction of noises in the head and ears, immediately removed by its use. ”

“ The analogy of all other organisms would lead us to expect that, with all these selective influences at work, the number of deaf-mutes should increase rapidly, and the interesting question, "How far do the facts justify this opinion?" at once presents itself, and we ask, first, whether deafness is hereditary; and, second, whether it is true that many deaf-mutes marry; and, third, whether our system of education does lead those who marry to select deaf-mutes as their partners; and, fourth, whether deafness is more frequent among their children than it is in the community at large. ”