Echoes of Care

More than one billion people live with hearing loss, making deafness one of the most common disabilities in the world. Despite the size of deaf communities and their rich cultural histories, in the Western world deafness is perceived primarily as a medical problem requiring a fix. In nineteenth-century Britain the shift from viewing deafness as auditory difference to framing it as a condition in need of medical intervention came at the insistence of an emerging group of professionals: aurists…