When disciplines such as surgery, psychiatry, and legal medicine were establishing their spheres of influence and authority from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, deafness was typically constructed as a problem to be solved. Each of these fields appropriated the question of deafness and claimed to find answers to this “problem.” By doing so, they created an understanding of deafness to which their response would be the most appropriate. For example, medical practitioners compared deafness to an illness and argued for the necessity of its eradication, developing specializations geared toward operating and rehabilitating the organs of hearing and speech (including laryngology, phonology, audiology, and psychiatry). Legal medicine, on the other hand, insisted on the urgency of adopting specific laws to govern the deaf. Meanwhile, educators and philosophers of language emphasized the use and role of sign language.
As such, the focus of my research is on the instrumentalization of the question of deafness in the construction of various disciplines, and the study of conflicting new conceptions and norms for mankind from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. In medicine, education, and philology, different rhetorics were elaborated that supported their respective fields and involved widely differing imaginings. On the one hand, these fields established analogies between the deaf, animals, and automatons and people to be colonized; on the other, they configured sign language as a means of accessing a natural or universal language. My objective is to exemplify how this complicated web of references was enlisted to make speaking or signing an essential feature when defining the ontological, epistemological, and moral expectations for mankind.
