Jaipreet Virdi

By concentrating on the tensions between the social model of deafness that encouraged education and isolation, and the medical model that prescribed a solution for “the problem of deafness,” her research analyzes the attempts of aurists to ward off the cloak of quackery and claim legitimacy for their field. Working alongside Dr. Sabine Arnaud’s research group, The Construction of Norms in 17th to 19th Century Europe and the United States, Virdi’s project looks at one such attempt aurists used to claim legitimacy: the “medical life” of the artificial tympanum, developed respectively by James Yearsley (1805-1869) and Josephn Toybnee (1815-1866), and the social, cultural, and medical processes that guided its development. The wave of enthusiasm following the device owed not only to its promise of a “cure,” but also because it fit with the nineteenth century design trend of innovations that favored concealment of hearing loss.