Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History by Jaipreet Virdi (review)

"Deaf peddling" refers to the practice by deaf individuals—or hearing people feigning deafness—of selling sign language alphabet cards or other sundries to sympathetic hearing folks in mall food courts or airports. In the medical realm, however, it might instead denote the peddling of "cures" to individuals anxious to restore their hearing. In her groundbreaking work Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History, Jaipreet Virdi examines over two centuries' worth of devices, potions, rituals, and surgeries marketed as panaceas for hearing loss.

Virdi combines extensive historical research with personal memoir, poignantly recounting her own experience with deafness. She weaves together newspaper and magazine advertisements, professional and lay medical journals, her own material interaction with various devices, and accounts by deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals themselves to argue that while the demarcations between quack cures and legitimate treatments have been—and still remain—obscure, the pursuit of hearing restoration is deeply ingrained in the deaf experience.

She demonstrates this convincingly over five chapters, each of which examines an eclectic assortment of (pseudo-)medical treatments and hearing technologies. In the first chapter, "Improbable Miracles," readers encounter cringe-inducing remedies ranging from onion-seasoned eel fat and goat blood ear drops to painful eardrum perforation. The extreme measures both prescribed and endured underscore the desperation of patients—or, in cases of congenital or childhood deafness, the people around them—for cures and the difficulties the labyrinthine cochlea and narrow eustachian tube posed to otologists.

The second chapter, "Ear Spectacles," examines aural prostheses such as artificial ear drums, ear trumpets, and hearing aids. Virdi traces innovations in both shrinking and camouflaging these assistive devices, on the one hand, and accessorizing and adorning them, on the other. This illuminates the hard-of-hearing person's dilemma: efforts to conceal communication challenges actually exposed one's invisible disability through the use of stigmatizing assistive technologies.

Next, "Electric Wonders" explores the application of galvanism to reanimate the ear like frogs' legs or Frankenstein's monster. Virdi also discusses the use of vibraphones, vibrometers, and other vibro-devices to knock free the excess calcification of the inner ear's tiny ossicles. Chapter Four, "Fanciful Fads," looks at the flying cure—with harrowing flips and dives aboard airplanes that caused ears to pop and stomachs to drop—and Daniel David Palmer's magnetic and chiropractic approaches to hearing restoration. She also highlights two surgical solutions: Julius Lempert's fenestration surgery, which involved drilling a "window" through the mastoid bone to the inner ear, and Curtis Muncie's manual manipulation of the eustachian tube by way of the larynx. While the American Medical Association was critical of these practices, glowing patient testimonials often contradicted professional judgment.

Virdi's final chapter, "Edge of Silence," examines the political, professional, and financial battles among audiologists, hearing aid dealers, and consumer advocates. With its trenchant analysis of hearing aid advertisements in popular magazines such as Better Living, Life, and Ladies' Home Journal, this chapter functions as an excellent stand-alone reading for use in classes to examine gendered technologies. Virdi shows that in their appeals to male consumers, hearing aid companies boasted their devices' facilitation of business and leadership. To attract female customers, they disguised microphones and other device components as fashionable costume jewelry and hair barrettes. A discussion of race around advertisements for "neutral-colored" or "lustrous ebony" devices would have been a welcome addition.

Deaf Studies scholars and members of the Deaf community will recognize that Hearing Happiness is not a "Deaf Gain" story—the title alone, borrowed from hearing aid advertisements, confirms this. Deaf Gain, according to H-Dirksen Bauman and Joséph Murray, challenges the Hearing Loss paradigm to highlight how society benefits from the existence of deaf people. Individuals deafened by meningitis are impervious to motion sickness, for instance, and have helped NASA study the effects of gravitational changes on humans. And deaf people, less fatigued by noise pollution than their hearing counterparts, proved especially...