Echoes of Care

How medical battles for professional legitimacy clashed with cultural perceptions to change the meaning of deafness.

Echoes of Care chronicles the historical shift that created complicated interdependences between medical intervention, language, and education to shape deaf people’s experiences in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

More than one billion people live with hearing loss, making deafness one of the most common disabilities in the world. Despite the size of deaf communities and their rich cultural histories, in the Western world deafness is perceived primarily as a medical problem requiring a fix. In nineteenth-century Britain the shift from viewing deafness as auditory difference to framing it as a condition in need of medical intervention came at the insistence of an emerging group of professionals: aurists.

Echoes of Care describes how British ear specialists sought to reshape deafness as a curable affliction that they were uniquely able to treat. Navigating a medical landscape fraught with professional rivalries and public distrust about the likelihood of a cure, aurists extended their authority towards key sites of intervention – the census, school medical testing, public health, deaf schools – to argue for the necessity of specialist care. Beneath the surface of these claims lay deeper questions about access to healthcare, cultural perceptions of disability, and the rise of eugenics.

Jaipreet Virdi explores the complex legacy of the medicalization of deafness and its profound implications for deaf history, culture, and lived experience.