Deafness has been in my family for generations and as a result, artifacts have been passed down. During a recent visit to my parents’ home, I discovered a 177 year-old document titled, The Thirteenth Report of the Directors of the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, Exhibited to the Asylum. May 16, 1829. The American Asylum is better known today as the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut. It is also the first school for the deaf founded by Laurent Clerc.
In this old manuscript is an excerpt written by a young woman that tells the story of Reverend Thomas Gallaudet and Alice Cogswell, his first deaf pupil.
I found this particular passage intriguing for it illustrates a viewpoint that has been influenced by religion. Also, the deaf author suggests that her own classmates are the ones who are deaf and dumb.
Here it is. All errors are the author’s. Analyze away.
By A Young Lady, 18 Years Old; Under Instruction 3 1/2 Years.
“About the Deaf and Dumb”
Almost twelve years ago, there was no school for the Deaf and Dumb in the United States. There were many ignorant pupils, they have not learned any thing about the creation of the world. By and by Rev. Mr. G visited Dr. C. who had a Deaf and Dumb daughter. He was much interested with her. He wished to teach her, but he did not know how to instruct her. Some of the gentlemen in Hartford proposed to Mr. G to go into England, to learn signs. So they gave much money to him for his voyage and board. Therefore he determined to go there. When he landed in England he entered into the Asylum for the deaf and dumb. The teachers there were unwilling to teach him signs. He left England for France. Mr. Sicard was well pleased to receive him into the Asylum. He was permitted to learn signs. He staid in France about one year. He wished to return with Mr. C. He obtained permission of Mr. Sicard to let Mr. C. go with him to this country, to instruct the unfortunate persons here. Some time after, they departed from their friends and landed in the Country. They took a great deal of pains to beg money for the ignorant persons throughout the cities of the United States. Many of the people generously gave much money to them. But some doubted whether they could teach the Deaf and Dumb. There was now a new asylum for them which had been built. Some of the poor deaf and dumb were allowed in it and learned to write. Now there are many pupils in the Asylum at Hartford. Indeed how happy are they to learn to understand and know God! How should they be grateful to Him for his charity and lovingkindness.
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Certainly, religion was a common denominator in the olden days of Deaf history/education. Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet…Abbes L’Epee & Sicard…Juan Pablo Bonet (Spanish priest)…Ponce de Leon (Spanish monk), and many more…
I am curious, since you only provided an excerpt, if this 18 y/o authoress ever mentioned her identity as being just Deaf or if she said nothing at all. Please do share that piece of information. If she separated herself from the Deaf and Dumb, why?
Deaf and dumb was the general terminology in the olden days. Now for ‘ignorant’, my interpretation for that term was uneducated or unenlightened. She also used ‘unfortunate’.
This excerpt is interesting because the authoress provided a condensed version of Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet’s visit to England & France.
“So they gave much money to him for his voyage and board. Therefore he determined to go there. When he landed in England he entered into the Asylum for the deaf and dumb. The teachers there were unwilling to teach him signs. He left England for France.”
The asylum mentioned here was the Braidwood Academy, which was actually located in Edinburgh, Scotland. Thomas Braidwood refused to share his teaching methods of the Deaf. (We later learned that he combined fingerspelling and speech.) Some sources will say that he opened up the first oral school in England.
(Sources will say that John Braidwood [the grandson] came to Virginia and set up a small Deaf school in Virginia in 1812 but it struggled. It closed in 1816. ASD was established in 1817.)
Dejected, Rev. Gallaudet went to London where, by happenstance, he met Abbe Sicard and some Deaf pupils. Sicard and the Deaf pupils were visiting from France to give a platform viewing for the public. The purpose was to show the public that the Deaf could be educated. It was there when Sicard invited Gallaudet to Paris and the rest is history.
Thanks for the additional info, Larry! And nope, the excerpt is typed out exactly as it appears in the manuscript. Nothing more.
Oh, bless your heart. I will bring salvation through Jesus to all the deaf and dumb children in America.
Did you know, Rob that many deaf people back in the late 19th century often proudly called themselves “deaf and dumb”? That would be seen as a modern definition of deaf people “culturally deaf” or ASLers!
The meaning of Old English for “dumb” is the inability to speak orally.
Many people tend to misunderstand what the term “deaf and dumb” really meant.
I once majored in Deaf History at Gallaudet before changed my major to Sociology.
Robert L. Mason (RLM)
While this might indeed have been the case for those in the late 19th century, I have to wonder what these folks would have thought if they were familiar with the writings of the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle…whose comments on deafness had a profound impact on the perceptions of deaf people, deaf education, and speech for many years to come.
Plato believed that without speech there is no outward sign of intelligence, thus Deaf people must not be capable of ideas or language; i.e. not capable of intelligence. Aristotle continued this thinking by writing “All those who are deaf from childhood are also dumb; they certainly make some kind of noise, but they have no language.”
I am not sure exactly when or how the term changed to simply meaning the inability to speak orally, but I still suspect that even though it might have been used with pride by the Deaf Community of the 1800’s, it was still a derogatory term to general society, who saw it as an indication of people who were somehow “a bit less human” than hearing persons, due to their inability to talk.
Hello Virginia Beach
I am curious about the source of your Aristotle quote.
In On the Sense and Sensibility, Aristotle puts forth a persuasive case that without language, a person lacks rational thought. Since the deaf did not have a language in the Hellenistic era, nor were they likely to survive infanticide, then it follows that Aristotle is correct.
This is covered in-depth on my blog, an analysis of Jack Gannon’s substandard scholarship regarding the philosophers.
Actually, the Deaf did have a language. Plato mentioned the Deaf and sign language in one of his works, Cratylus.
Dr. Dirksen Bauman, a professor of ASL & Deaf Studies Dept. at Gallaudet, discusses this in his Philosophy of Language course. I believe that he is/was working on a publication where he gives an in-depth analysis of Plato’s Cratylus. I’ll have to follow up with him to make sure. I do know that he does give lectures at various places and also discusses Plato.
An excerpt from Plato’s Cratylus…
SOCRATES: Very good; but then how do the primary names which precede analysis show the natures of things, as far as they can be shown; which they must do, if they are to be real names? And here I will ask you a question: Suppose that we had no voice or tongue, and wanted to communicate with one another, should we not, like the deaf and dumb, make signs with the hands and head and the rest of the body?
HERMOGENES: There would be no choice, Socrates.
SOCRATES: We should imitate the nature of the thing; the elevation of our hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness; heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop to the ground; if we were describing the running of a horse, or any other animal, we should make our bodies and their gestures as like as we could to them.
HERMOGENES: I do not see that we could do anything else.
Thanks for posting this information, Larry. It certainly does shed a new light on this topic. It’s always nice to learn new things that help to change possible erroneous perspectives!
I do have a book on the writings of Plato, but must confess that I haven’t gotten too far into this. Nice to see that Socrates did have some positive thoughts on the use of manual-visual communication.
This is also a language and cultural issue - the Greek term Aristole used to define humans as speaking/thinking beings, which escapes me at the moment - referred to the neccessity of needing to produce rhetoric to convey reason. Subsequent scholars, however, took his Greek wording to mean that speaking and producing rhetoric were one and the same (or intertwined, anyway).
They were familiar with the Greek philosophers and their works. They were also familiar with the philosophers of their time. Pierre Desloges, one of the earliest Deaf writers, commented on the philosophies of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his book, Observations of a Deaf-Mute. These philosophers believed that gestures/signs was the natural language of man.
Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld has wrote an extensive book about the Deaf during the French Enlightenment titled A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in the Late Eighteenth-Century France. It’s academic in nature which, like Paddy Ladd’s Deafhood, you have to take frequent breaks in between readings and digest what you’ve just read.
Hmmm….yet more books to add to my ever expanding list, Larry? Can you recommend one that teaches us how to add a couple more hours to the day so I can get a couple of pages read on a more regular basis?
As for digesting Dr. Rosenfeld’s academic publication, which would you suggest to wash it down with - a nice chianti or a cold beer?
(Just kidding, my friend!)
LOL!
As for the recommendation…good question. I think in school with deadlines, you gotta read if you wanna stay on top of everything and pass.
Now that I’m done with school and working, I got a couple of academic books lined up to read. I just gotta make the time to read them. Yet, I keep reading fiction.
Yes, the term “dumb” used to mean lacking the ability to speak. Because speech was generally considered to be symmetrical with intelligence, the word “dumb” therefore has an implied meaning of stupidity. I may be wrong, but I think the Deaf community back then had taken the label “deaf and dumb” to designate a way of viewing Deaf people that was pervasive among hearing people, much as Africian-Americans used the term “Negro” to designate the way in which white people used to think of them. I read in the literature that many Deaf people in the old day did in fact proudly regard themselves as “deaf and mute,” which was equivalent to the modern label “Deaf” with the capital “D.” When they encountered a late-deafened person, they would say “Oh, he’s not deaf and mute like us; he’s just deaf.” Speech at the time was practically an impossible art for prelingually deaf people until Alexandes Graham Bell came into being and developed speech-training strategies for them.
I must say I am impressed with the 18-year-old Deaf author’s mastery of English, considering that she seemed to have received no more than 4 years of formal education at Laurent Clerc’s school. She was probably educated somehow by her parents at home before she began attending the school.
I noticed that your family heirloom - ASD artificat - somewhat partially damaging from careless handlings - water spigion marks.
I hope that you will take a brisk course how to handle the historical paper artificat. You may keep the ASD artificat from further damage. That would be really nice if you take this artificat to the PBS’s “Old Things” for apparision. I am kinda curious what apparisasers really think about your family heirloom.
The basic stuff about the preservance of historical papers are stored in acid-free envelope from further detoriation.
Many thanks for sharing your family heirloom with all of us, DeafDc readers!
Robert L. Mason (RLM)
I believe you are referring to the PBS program “Antiques Roadshow.” I have often watched this show and do find the information which the appraisers give to be quite interesting and helpful.
I do agree that would be worthwhile to take this family heirloom to an expert who can give proper advice on how to preserve it for future generations.
Rob Rice,
The Deaf and Dumb labeling is still used in the developing countries these days and in my country Pakistan as well. I was against this labeling, and have wrote an essay on it that challenges the meaning of Deaf and Dumb on cultural terms in a country where older generations have a strong influence over the young generation and the literacy rate is very low.
Thanks for showing everyone that Deaf and Dumb is still used in the modern times still.
It sucks. Such is our burden as Deaf people. I read a comment posted somewhere that audism will continue to exist as long as there are racism and other forms of discrimination. How so true. It looks like we must constantly combat audism.
We will prevail!
I once went to a summer camp at Bill Rice Ranch in Tennessee when I was about 12 or 13. It was a Southern Baptist Bible camp for deaf kids. During my first time there, Cathy Rice, the benefactor of the Bill Rice Ranch got up in front of the congregation of deaf kids and haltingly signed while she spoke in her deep Southern drawl, “I Loooooveeee the Deaf!”
What people will do for religion really astonishes me. Gallaudet probably had to use religion and delivering God to the “ignorant” deaf as a way to raise funds.
As Gallaudet is a private institution it would be difficult to find out…
It used to be Deaf and Dumb and now its Deaf and hard of hearing. We know what Deaf is and now does that mean hard of hearing used to be dumb?
Do you think in 50 years from now, the term “Deaf and Dumb” will be in vogue amongst hip deaf crowd? Just like the gay scene embracing the word “queer”. Also, the African American community using the n-word as a term of affection.
It is already happening but not as common as the other groups. We need to refrain from doing so because we have a long way ahead of us with many issues to resolve.
In addition, the mainstream is familiar to these groups whereas it is not towards the deaf group.
http://www.time.com/time/magaz.....66,00.html
I like to make a correction regarding “deaf and dumb” term. I realize that I did make a factual error about deaf people proudly called themselves “deaf and dumb”.
The correct one is “deaf mute” which currently resembles the “D” for deaf to describe themselves to the community at large.
My sincere apology for enclosing the social definition of deaf people in historical sense in such a factual error. Thanks.
Robert L. Mason (RLM)
Rob, I wonder why you use the pathological term like “deafness” within your family.
Any term with “ness” tend to pathologize such disease or subject in unfavorable light.
Don’t black people describe their skin colors with “blackness”?
What about hearing people describe themselves “heariness”? Nah!
You ought to say “I come from the deaf family for several generations”. Something like that!
That is time to de-pathologize ourselves with the simple description of who and what we are. “Deaf” will do that! I am no deaf militant.
We ought to remmy that the power of language is much powerful than we usually imagine.
Robert L. Mason (RLM)