Karen Sayer

Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss in Britain, 1830–1930

This book looks at how hearing loss among adults was experienced, viewed and treated in Britain before the National Health Service. We explore the changing status of ‘hard of hearing’ people during the nineteenth century as categorized among diverse and changing categories of ‘deafness’. Then we explore the advisory literature for managing hearing loss, and techniques for communicating with hearing aids, lip-reading and correspondence networks. From surveying the commercial selling and daily use of hearing aids, we see how adverse developments in eugenics prompted otologists to focus primarily on the prevention of deafness. The final chapter shows how hearing loss among First World War combatants prompted hearing specialists to take a more supportive approach, while it fell to the National Institute for the Deaf, formed in 1924, to defend hard of hearing people against unscrupulous hearing aid vendors. This book is suitable for both academic audiences and the general reading public. All royalties from sale of this book will be given to Action on Hearing Loss and the National Deaf Children’s Society.

Transforming the countryside: the electrification of rural Britain

It is now almost impossible to conceive of life in western Europe, either in the towns or the countryside, without a reliable mains electricity supply. By 1938, two-thirds of rural dwellings had been connected to a centrally generated supply, but the majority of farms in Britain were not linked to the mains until sometime between 1950 and 1970. Given the significance of electricity for modern life, the difficulties of supplying it to isolated communities, and the parallels with current discussions over the provision of high-speed broadband connections, it is surprising that until now there has been little academic discussion of this vast and protracted undertaking. This book fills that gap. It is divided into three parts. The first, on the progress of electrification, explores the timing and extent of electrification in rural England, Wales and Scotland; the second examines the effects of electrification on rural life and the rural landscape; and the third makes comparisons over space and time, looking at electrification in Canada and Sweden and comparing electrification with the current problems of rural broadband.

Communicating with Hearing Loss

This sets up an experiential comparison between the loss of hearing and the loss of vision to show both how they were inter-related through the reliance of many hard of hearing people on vision to conduct communications. This is explored in relation to both the use of lip-reading, often taught by women, and correspondence networks between deaf people, also characteristically suiting the needs of isolated hard of hearing women.

Institutionally Organizing for Hearing Loss

This looks at the organisations set up to advocate the rights of deaf and hard of hearing people in response to eugenic and economic discrimination against them. We focus first on the Deaf and Dumb Times as a forum for the heterogeneous deaf community with hard of hearing journalists articulating the nature of their exploitation and repression. Next we look at how the National Institute for the Deaf in 1924 emerged to a new umbrella role: one key factor was how the First World War changed the perceptions of deafness through new sympathy for combatant hearing loss. This transformed the advocacy of the pre-War organisations into a more unified national approach to defend the needs of hard of hearing people to trustworthy advice and support.

The Diverse and Changing Categories of Deafness

The very broad nineteenth century umbrella notion of ‘deafness’ covered various kinds of differential auditory experience, among which being ‘hard of hearing’ was just the most pervasive. We explore how understandings of deafness developed and multiplied as the manifold causes of acquired deafness in disease and aging developed further differentiations, including the advent of ‘war-deafness’ in the global conflict of 1914–1918.

Preventing Deafness: Two Medical Approaches

The cultural climate of early twentieth century Britain combined eugenic and economic factors which threatened the well-being and status of all kinds of deafened people. In this context we discuss two otologists’ attempts to (re)medicalise deafness with a new emphasis on how to prevent rather than cure it. We look at Percival MacLeod Yearsley of London and his eugenic obsession with the small minority for which deafness was allegedly heritable and the Glasgow-based James Kerr Love who aimed to show that most acquired deafness arose from health factors relating to poverty.

Selling and Using Hearing Aids

Hard of hearing people generally wanted to maintain conversations with the hearing without the awkwardness of reliance on lip-reading or writing. We discuss the many kinds of hearing aid available, disguised or elegantly designed for display, suited variously for many kinds and degrees of hearing loss. Two especially eminent London-based hearing aid companies are discussed: the genteel bespoke personal service of the Rein Company and the more medically-oriented mail order service of Hawskley. The more opportunist hearing aid vendors who sought just to profit from hearing loss are discussed through the critical eyes of campaigning journalists who were themselves hard of hearing.

Advice for Managing Hearing Loss

Although surgeons in the early nineteenth century sought to cure hearing loss, this strategy was gradually abandoned as it became clearer that most forms were incurable. This practice soon retreated into support for hearing trumpets. We then investigate how Harriet Martineau argued against trust in medical advice and put forward her own example as a self-confident ‘deaf’ person managing her life with a hearing trumpet. This is complemented by a survey of the often far from disinterested advice from hearing aid vendors about what kinds of hearing trumpet or alternatives should be purchased.