In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 1 / Disability and Society before the Eighteenth Century 33 pupils, Luis de Valesco. In exile in Paris in 1644, Digby wrote Treatise on the Nature of Bodies, in which he recounted the unprecedented accomplishments in Spain with the deaf (see Digby, 1665, 1827). Through his close correspondence with John Wallis on philosophical subjects, Digby presented the Spanish accomplishments to a small British audience avidly searching for new lines of philosophical inquiry. Over the following half-century Bonet's work guided and inspired a quintet of British works on the nature of language, the elements of speech, and practical methodologies for teaching deaf persons. In seventeenth-century England philosophical inquiry rather than pragmatic considerations underlay early designs for intervention with disabled individuals . Philosophers, avidly probing the origin and development of language, recruited deaf people as objects of study. Blind people were also studied. The philosophers wished to discover whether a person who had never seen could, if sight were suddenly restored, recognize through vision what had previously been learned by touch. The Royal Society of London, an organization of thinkers and scientists, gained a royal charter in 1662 with an informal mandate to find "histories of phenomena ," the universal and natural "history of things." Paralleling the quest for a universal history was a desire for a universal language , frequently marked by a demand for a dictionary of words to provide accuracy and precision to the language. Calls for a universal language, first heard in the mid-seventeenth century, echoed again and again across the next three hundred years, always to the ultimate advantage of deaf persons. For example, the search was continued in the next century by such redoubtable characters as John Cleland, who wrote the immortal (or immoral) Fanny Hill to finance his elusive search. And as we shall see, in the nineteenth century Alexander Melville Bell's quest for a universal alphabet altered the education of deaf children for nearly a hundred years. With their strong emphasis on language, it is little wonder that members of the Royal Society issued so many studies of deafness; examples are those undertaken by William Holder, George Dalgarno, John Bulwer, and John Wallis. Their purpose was to learn from deaf persons the secret of what people were like before language, what their ideas were before being filtered and shaped by conversation. These philosopher-scientists elucidated their work with deaf children and adults in philosophical papers written for the society: Wallis's De loquela (1653) and "A Letter to Robert Boyle Esq." ([1670] n.d.); William Holder's Elements of Speech ([1699] 1967); George Dalgarno's Didascalocophus ([1680] 1971); and George Sibscota's Deaf and Dumb Man's Discourse ([1670] 1967). These were chiefly philosophical treatises concerning the nature of language that contained elaborate analyses of the different elements of speech. The teaching of deaf people was used to illustrate the new theories that were beginning to take hold. Some, depending on the bent of the author, stressed the acquisition of artificial speech (Mathison, 1906). The reports of these pioneers thus hold interest today chiefly as early instances of educational efforts; they did not represent advances in the comprehension of the psychology of deafness . Most of the members of the Royal Society interested in deafness were dilettantes who had little or no insight into the epistemological and psychological complexities of deafness (Seigel, 1969). In concert with notions prevalent since 34 Part 1 / Lessons of a Dark Past the days of Hippocrates, they viewed deaf people as curiosities and were more often concerned with speculations of the physiological causes and cures for deafness than with the psychological, social, and educational applications of their findings. John Wallis (1616-1703), a professor of geometry at Oxford and one of the founding members of the Royal Society, was the most influential British authority on deafness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Hoolihan, 1985). As an internationally respected mathematician, a prolific author, a correspondent with some of the best minds in Europe, and one of the greatest of Newton's English precursors (Hoolihan, 1985), Wallis's reputation in his own and later ages was such that he exerted a profound influence on the nascent field of special education. Wallis's Grammatica linguae anglicanae. Cui praefiguT, De loquela sive sonorumm formastione, tractacus grammaticophysicus was a grammar of the English language for non-English speakers printed at Oxford in 1653 and written in Latin. Prefaced to the Grammatica was a treatise of particular importance to the education of deaf persons...

Share