Deafness in the 17th Century: Into Empiricism

Conrad & Weiskrantz DEAFNESS IN THE 17TH CENTURY: INTO EMPIRICISM R. Conrad Barbara C. Weiskrantz NOW, towards the end of the 20th century, hardly a nation in the world does not make some formal provision for the education of deaf children. In the Third World much of this development is recent. In Britain the history is a good deal longer. But well before the first school was founded in Edinburgh in 1760, we can trace two centuries of recorded endeavor by dedicated men to establish and exemplify principles by which the attempt might be made. It was a slow growing discipline. A pair of hands suffices to count the number of relevant treatises published by the end of the 17th century. Here we are principally concerned with events in Britain. In their course, these events provoked inordinate passions but paved the way for the swift and far-reaching developments of the following century. Yet they seem almost to have been triggered by accident. Kenelm Digby and the In the year 1623, in the the de Velasco family. course of his travels, Kenelm Digby, then aged 20 and shortly to be knighted, arrived in Madrid. That his brother, Sir Edward Digby was ambassador to Spain, was probably why he included Madrid in his itinerary. There he met Charles, Prince of Wales, shortly to become King Charles I of England. Charles was unsuccessfully courting the Infanta; Kenelm's thoughts were largely on his fiance Venetia in England. His coded memoirs (later SLS 45 Winter 1984 Conrad & Weiskrantz deciphered), which were published a few years later (20) are full of his reveries of Venetia, but are silent on the experience which had a significant role in the history of the education of the deaf in Britain. Kenelm Digby was part of the group around Prince Charles when he was taken to view a spectacle considered to be suitable to impress a future monarch. The "spectacle" was a young man named Luis de Velasco, who was described by Digby (19) as having been born deaf and dumb, but who had been taught to speak and to understand speech by lipreading. Digby did not describe this experience until 1644 when his wide-ranging philosophical work, Treatise on the Nature of Bodies was published in Paris, and in a London edition in 1658. By then, Digby, now Sir Kenelm, had become a diplomat, naval commander, philosopher, and amateur scientist. Though he was regarded as a shrewd observer and was one of the magic circle, along with Boyle and Wren, who were instrumental in founding the Royal Society, his scientific pretensions were suspect; he dabbled in astrology and alchemy. The Dictionary of National Biography notes that, ".. .his credulity led him to many ludicrous conclusions." He allowed his name to be used with useless potions sold in the streets of London. When he came to recount the events in Madrid of 20 or so years earlier, he included a number of confusing minor errors of fact: but though many of Prince Charles's entourage were present when Luis de Velasco was "demonstrated," Digby's is the only written account to have survived. Its influence became unique, and on one critical matter it was opaque: he failed to name Luis's teacher. Luis was the deaf brother of the then Constable of Winter 1984 SLS 45 Conrad & Weiskrantz Castile, Bernardino Hernandez de Velasco, and grandson of Inigo Hernandez, a previous Constable. The Hernandez family also had a long history of hereditary deafness. Inigo Hernandez himself had three deaf children. The eldest, Francisco, died young. But the youngest, Pedro, was taught by Ponce de Le6n. Luis's brother was the sixth or seventh member of the family to hold the hereditary title of Constable, an office first held by Pedro, Count of Haro in 1473. Though Digby reports that Luis was born deaf, according to Bonet (2), he became deaf at the age of two years. Given the state of the diagnosis of deafness in the 17th century, there is abundant opportunity for conflicting opinion. For Digby, the difference between deafness at birth or at two would have been both trivial and inconsequential -- though Luis was said to have been a...