Deaf-Mutes

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

persons both deaf and dumb. Inability to talk follows from the inability to hear. Deafness is due to some defect in the ear, of course. It may be traced often to scrofula and other diseases. The children of a marriage between first cousins are particularly liable to be deaf. A deaf person is wonderfully imitative. The necessity of communicating by signs when words fail has led to the gradual evolution of a sign language, now regularly taught in deaf-mute schools, or schools for defectives, as they are called. The ancients and the medieval writers considered it hardly possible to educate a mute. Accounts of individual instruction appear with increasing frequency, however; and in 1778, during the progress of the American Revolution, the first public school for deaf-mutes was established in other European countries. The first in America was founded in 1817 at Hartford. They are now the rule in the various states and provinces. In addition to the sign language, which has been compared to that of the plains Indian, sign alphabets have been devised. Spelling by hand is rather slow, but it is accurate. There is no special difficulty, of course, in teaching deaf-mutes to read and to write with facility. Educated deaf-mutes prefer to communicate by writing. There are between 300 and 400 schools for deaf-mutes in the various countries of Europe, with a few in Japan and India. There are seven in Canada; in the United States 128 schools are attended by about 10,000 pupils. There were 40,592 deaf-mutes in the United States in June, 1900-one to each 2,400 of population.