Tinctures, pills, brain surgery, dangerous flights, tiny microphones, eel fat, snake skin, mercury: one gets the distinct feeling reading Jaipreet Virdi’s new book that there is nothing someone somewhere hasn’t tried in the long quest to “cure” deafness. Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History is full of satisfying litanies of the strange and unexpected remedies for deafness that people have invented, ingested, undergone, and rejected over the last couple of centuries. But the book is not actually an investigation of quackery or ludicrous advertising, though there is plenty of the latter. Part memoir and part monograph, Hearing History resists easy disciplinary categorization because it is a history—not of a discrete subject or time, but of identities and experiences. 

Hearing people often speak of deafness as though all deaf people have lost something vital. But, as Virdi points out, many deaf people were born without hearing, and thus the sense of “loss” that motivates the search for a cure is felt by the hearing people who surround them, and not by congenitally deaf people themselves. It is no surprise, then, that many purported cures for deafness are invented, marketed, and purchased by hearing people. Hearing parents of deaf children are the primary consumers of hearing aids and cochlear implants. In making such observations, Hearing Happiness asks us to consider the autonomy of deaf children, who are often unable to participate meaningfully in interventions on their own deafness or hearing loss until they are teenagers. 

When a deaf person does choose to have some intervention that allows them to hear, the process is rarely as easy as advertised. The popular image of the “switch on” moment when a deaf person hears for the first time obscures more than it reveals. How does someone who has never heard their own voice learn to speak? The extensive therapy, physical discomfort, and enormous cost that accompany these “cures” don’t get documented in inspirational viral videos, but are the reality of deaf people who pursue these interventions. This tension about who decides what deafness means, whether and how it should be cured, and what kind of life deaf people can have is the heart of Virdi’s work. 

“Hearing people often speak of deafness as though all deaf people have lost something vital.”

The introduction and conclusion of the book deal with these themes in theoretical and historiographical terms, and the bulk of the book addresses them from the archive and the museum. Virdi traces a dizzying array of devices, patent medicines, and therapies designed to cure deafness––or more often, designed to appear to cure deafness. Virdi makes excellent use of advertising sources and artifacts in her analysis. A section on the gendered advertising for hearing aids –– hearing men are more productive at work and hearing women are better carers at home –– is especially demonstrative of the ways that modern American cultural norms supported the quest for a cure. 

While researching the book, Virdi visited a museum, where she convinced a reluctant curator to let her try using an antique ear trumpet. The anecdote follows a moving discussion about Dorothy Eugenie Brett, the daughter of a lord who grew up in Queen Victoria’s court, and who lost her hearing as a young woman. Virdi recounts how Brett refashioned her identity, trading a cloistered life among the royals for a new bohemian hair cut, a place at an art school, a clutch of friends that included Virginia Woolf—and an ear trumpet named Toby. Virdi traces Brett’s life through letters, photos and paintings, showing how the ear trumpet played a pivotal role in the way Brett negotiated her identity and helped her to “pass” within her elite social circles. As Brett moved away from these, eventually ending up far from Windsor castle in the high desert of New Mexico, this sense of passing mattered to her less. Still, Toby remained a part of her life. By following this story with her own experience of an antique ear trumpet, Virdi knits history to the present. She reminds us both of the important materiality of this history, and of the richness and variety of the experience of deafness. 

Virdi lost her own hearing as a small child, the result of a dangerous case of meningitis that threatened her life and changed it forever. She thus guides us through the history of deafness cures as both a historian immersed in the archive as well as a deaf woman with her own experiences navigating today’s landscape of treatments and so-called cures. It’s a special gift for a history like this. Virdi is interested in the efficacy of various deafness cures only inasmuch as they demonstrate the huge variety of choices and experiences deaf and hard of hearing people have had in navigating a hearing world. That is, this is not a book about debunking quackery. It is something much more interesting: a history of who makes decisions about what is normal, who is designated impaired or disabled, who determines such criteria, and how people who experience different types of hearing loss have understood their own bodies and identities.

Image Credit: The Ear. George Arents Cigarette Cards. NYPL Digital Collections.