scholarly journals Purchase, Use and Adaptation : Interpreting ‘Patented’ Aids to the Deaf in Victorian Britain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Gooday ◽  
Karen Sayer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Hearing Aids ◽  
Hard Of Hearing ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Patent Office ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
Complex Relationships

While aids to hearing were ubiquitous in nineteenth century middle class culture, they have only recently attracted attention among historians.Many such devices were inscribed with patent markings officially approved by the London Patent Office. Others instead simply bore claims to expired patents or the name of apparent ‘patentees’: such inscriptions served to persuade prospective purchasers that certain devices were ‘genuine’ inventions. The purchase of hearing aids was thus subject to complex relationships between designers, users, and user-designers centred on issues of trust, identity and efficacy. Drawing on patent records, advertising, the writings of ‘deaf’ journalists and artefacts, this chapter explores the selling of hearing aids as both a commercial and cultural encounter. First it looks at how the Rein and Hawksley companies adopted different strategies with regard to patenting and engaging prospective customers. Second it examines how hard-of-hearing journalists critiqued the opportunist vendors that often cited patents in their ‘advertising’ as a guarantor of effectiveness. The chapter concludes by examining the lived experiences of hearing aids purchasers, showing how such research affords historians the opportunity to investigate the histories of the deaf and hard of hearing through the material culture they accessed, whether designed for them or sometimes even by them.

Paradise Lost? Patterns and Precarity in Working-Class Academic Narratives

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-44
Author(s):  
Deborah M. Warnock
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Student Debt ◽  
Survivor Guilt ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Impostor Syndrome

Through an analysis of eight collections of autoethnographic essays written by working-class academics and published over the span of thirty-two years, I identify stable themes and emergent patterns in lived experiences. Some broad and stable themes include a sense of alienation, lack of cultural capital, encountering stereotypes and microaggressions, experiencing survivor guilt and the impostor syndrome, and struggling to pass in a middle-class culture that values ego and networking. Two new and troubling patterns are crippling amounts of student debt and the increased exploitation of adjunct labor. I emphasize the importance of considering social class background as a form of diversity in academia and urge continued research on the experiences of working-class academics.

Foundations of Language Development in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Infants

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Dani Levine ◽  
Daniela Avelar ◽  
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff ◽  
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek ◽  
Derek M. Houston
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Cochlear Implants ◽  
Hearing Aids ◽  
Hard Of Hearing ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Effective Interventions ◽  
Hearing Devices ◽  
Language Input ◽  
Hearing Children

Copious evidence indicates that, even in the first year of life, children’s language development is beginning and is impacted by a wide array of cognitive and social processes. The extent to which these processes are dependent on early language input is a critical concern for most deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children, who, unlike hearing children, are usually not immersed in a language-rich environment until effective interventions, such as hearing aids or cochlear implants, are implemented. Importantly, some cognitive and social processes are not dependent on the early availability of language input and begin to develop before children are fitted for hearing aids or cochlear implants. Interventions involving parent training may be helpful for enhancing social underpinnings of language and for maximizing DHH children’s language learning once effective hearing devices are in place. Similarly, cognitive training for DHH children may also provide benefit to bolster language development.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

"The Sex" and the Domestic Sanctuary: Symbols of Middle-Class Culture

1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 260
Author(s):  
Mary G. De Jong ◽  
Mabel Collins Donnelly ◽  
Colleen McDannell ◽  
Clifford E. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Class Culture

scholarly journals Speech Sound Production in 2-Year-Olds Who Are Hard of Hearing

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie E. Ambrose ◽  
Lauren M. Unflat Berry ◽  
Elizabeth A. Walker ◽  
Melody Harrison ◽  
Jacob Oleson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Hearing Loss ◽  
Hearing Aids ◽  
Hard Of Hearing ◽  
Sound Production ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Vowel Production ◽  
Severe Hearing Loss ◽  
Children's Speech

Purpose The purpose of the study was to (a) compare the speech sound production abilities of 2-year-old children who are hard of hearing (HH) to children with normal hearing (NH), (b) identify sources of risk for individual children who are HH, and (c) determine whether speech sound production skills at age 2 were predictive of speech sound production skills at age 3. Method Seventy children with bilateral, mild-to-severe hearing loss who use hearing aids and 37 age- and socioeconomic status–matched children with NH participated. Children's speech sound production abilities were assessed at 2 and 3 years of age. Results At age 2, the HH group demonstrated vowel production abilities on par with their NH peers but weaker consonant production abilities. Within the HH group, better outcomes were associated with hearing aid fittings by 6 months of age, hearing loss of less than 45 dB HL, stronger vocabulary scores, and being female. Positive relationships existed between children's speech sound production abilities at 2 and 3 years of age. Conclusion Assessment of early speech sound production abilities in combination with demographic, audiologic, and linguistic variables may be useful in identifying HH children who are at risk for delays in speech sound production.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Special aids to hearing

1977 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-14
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Aids ◽  
Hard Of Hearing ◽  
Hearing Aid ◽  
Testing Service ◽  
General Guidance

We have recently discussed the use of hearing aids.1 For many hard-of-hearing people the help given by a hearing aid is not enough, and some are not helped by an aid. The Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID) booklet ‘Special Aids to Hearing’ describes devices other than hearing aids, all tested by them; it gives manufacturers’ addresses and usually prices. It also gives information on a free hearing-aid testing service in London and in Glasgow available by appointment and by post. This booklet complements the advice in the DHSS booklet ‘General Guidance to Hearing-aid Users’ which is available to patients from their local NHS hearing-aid centre.

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