Until the middle of the 18th century, thinking about the way the inner ear worked was still dominated by Aristotle’s idea of “aer implantus”.

There were only a few who dared to speak out against this view.  Schelhammer in 1684 expressed a doubt that there was an implanted air in the ear, but offered no substitute. Valsalva (1704), Vieussens (1714), and Cassebohm (1734) suggested the prescence of fluid but made little of it for they still spoke of the “aer implantus.”  In 1739, Boerhaave quite specifically spoke of the prescence of fluid in the labyrinth. (Bast and Anson 1949)

Domenico Cotugno, a pioneer of neuroscience, was the first person to prove the presence of a serous fluid in the labyrinth and the first to associate this with sound transmission.  He believed that sound waves move the stapes which in turn move the labyrinthine fluid, considered that tones could be perceived by the semicircular canals but were analyzed in the cochlea (ibid).

When he was only 25, in 1761, his dissertation, Aquaeductibus auris humane internae, predated the work of Hermann von Helmholtz.  In it he described the vestibule, semicircular canals, and cochlea.  He demonstrated the labyrinthine fluid, and considered mechanisms of resonance, sound transmission, and hearing.  He depicted the columns in the bony spiral lamina of the cochlea known as Cotunnius’ columns.  His description of the nasopalatine nerve, and its role in sneezing anticipated Antonio Scarpa’s work. (Pearce 2004)

Born in Ruvo di Puglia, Cotugno was educated at a Jesuit school then was sponsored by the Duke d’Andria to attend the University of Naples, working in the Ospedale degli Incurabili.  He spent many hours studying in the library, a time he said that was the happiest of his life (hint!).  He received his doctorate from the Salerno Medical School in 1756.

Cotugno is an outstanding example of a humanistic physician. I addition to being one of the most prominent scientists of his time, he was also interested in art, architecture, nusismatics and antiquities. He accumulated a remarkable private library, a small part of which is still conserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples (Böni et al 1994)

When he died he left a large sum of money to the Ospedale degli Incurabili, now known as the Ospedale Domenico Cotugno.

His two illustrations from Auris humane are shown here.

De aquaeductibus auris humane internae anatomica dissertatio. 1761

Böni T, Benini A, Dvorak J. Domenico Felice Antonio Cotugno.  Spine (Phila Pa 1976). 1994 Aug 1;19(15):1767-70

Theodore H. Bast and Barry J. Anson.  The temporal bone and the ear. 1949

Günther Christoph Schelhammer (1649-1716) was from a family that originated in Hamburg.  However he was born in Jena where his father Christoph was a surgeon and professor.  After studying and travelling in Holland, England and Italy, Schelhammer became professor of Anatomy, Botany and Surgery.  He married Maria Conring (herself an author of a popular cookery book) daughter of the polymath and expert in German law, Hermann Conring.

I am not sure of the position that Schelhammer holds in the history of ENT – if you know please do comment.  He apparently knew Boyle and Morison from his visit to England.

At any rate, this book from 1684, De Auditu Liber Singularis, has some very nice early illustrations of the malleus, incus and stapes.  Click on the image for a larger size.

Gisbert Cuper, or Gisbertus Cuperus as his name appears in the Latin in which he published, was a Dutch antiquarian and philologist (1644-1716).  The book of his we have in the library, bound with Antonius Borremansius’s Variarum Lectionum Liber, is called simply Harpocrates.  Harpocrates was the Greek and Roman God of Silence, adapted from the Egyptian Har-pa-khered in the Hellenistic period.  He was the child version of Horus, the newborn sun, depicted in statues as a child with a finger to his mouth.  This, representing a child, was misinterpreted by Greeks as meaning silence, and we see a depiction of that on the title page of the book here:

Throughout, our copy is heavily annotated in ink by a previous owner, but in a hand I cannot decipher.  I find the illustrations charming!  I confess I wondered if Harpo Marx got his name in any way from this god, being the brother who never spoke on screen, but although his brother Groucho joked that he had, he was named after his harp playing.

One of my favourite books in out collection has little to do with hearing or deafness as far as I can see – Veridicus Christianus by Joanne or Jan David, published in 1601 in Antwerp.  It is a Jesuit ’emblem book’.  It has the most beautiful engravings, probably by a member of the Galle family, Theodoor or Cornelius .  The page here on the left is the reason we have it – there is a funnel that presumably is directing sound from (or to?) the man in the pulpit.

Here are some more illustrations… click onto the images for a slightly more demonic size.

Looking at it makes me feel like a character in the film The Ninth Gate!

Charlotte O’Brien was born on 23rd of November 1845 into an Anglo-Irish protestant family that was a branch of the Dromoland O’Brien Baronets. Her father William was an M.P. and Young Ireland nationalist moved by the great famine  to take part in the 1848 rebellion. He was condemned to be hanged drawn and quartered for treason but was however reprieved and allowed to return to Ireland after a period in exile. All of his children had some hearing problems, with his son William being deaf from birth. Charlotte had a form of progressive hearing loss, and as we see from her poem below (dated 1879) by her mid 30s she had become deaf.

Charlotte devoted many years to helping the poor emigrants who were pushed off the land firstly by the famines and then by other social pressures. These people had to endure further privations in lodging houses and then on board ships to America and Australia, and she tried to alleviate their suffering. Her nephew says in his memoir (1909, p.75),

None of her letters tell of the sharp struggle she had to face in Queenstown itself when she actually started. […] when she and her man John went down to the station to meet arrivals they were hustled violently and threatened with worse. She described to me a perfect pandemonium, poor creatures from the wilds of Kerry or Connaught emerging like cattle from the crowded carriages, sick with hunger or fatigue, stupefied with grief ; and then the mob of lodginghouse runners seizing them, dragging them this way and that, with noisy exhortations.
Thus she began her work of love in a turmoil of mean and jealous hatred, bullied and browbeaten.

Charlotte was criticised for helping emigrants who accepted the £5 ‘bribe’ that some English philanthropists paid to every person who would leave. This was seen by nationalists as a form of  social engineering to remove trouble makers. She went to America to promote her cause. Here is her nephew Stephen Gwynn again (ibid. p.86);

when I look on the record of her work in America, as I find it in old newspaper cuttings, it is amazing how little physical disabilities weighed on her. She had never spoken in public; yet she addressed great audiences successfully; she was extremely deaf, yet she went everywhere making acquaintances, making friends, entering into the whole life of the place as very few women could do with every natural advantage.

Continuing to write all her life, she was however never successful at it according to Gwynn, for “She was too busy living to concentrate her powers on the special task of bringing an art to it’s completeness.” Charlotte’s best work is where she was constrained by metre he says. He calls her writings on deafness “vehement Brontësque outpourings: and of such there is a good deal among her unpublished papers, though none else so poignant.” (ibid. p.131-2)

She died in 1909 having converted to Roman Catholicism. Back in Ireland she did a lot of work on the botany of her beloved Limerick.

The important thing about her is “not what she did but what she was” says Stephen Gwynn (ibid.p.133-4), but “a true portraiture would show, I think, two chief excellencies, a nature unstunted by an infirmity which went to the very core of life, and a passionate love of her country with a sense of kinship with its poorest people.”

DEAFNESS THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

The woods are silenced for me, and the streams
Ripple no more for me along the leas;
No more for me the birds sing melodies
To greet the morn, or give the sun good dreams;
No more the circling rooks in heavy crowds
Beat homeward cawing, ‘neath the wind-swept clouds.

Where are the sweet sounds gone ? Are they all gone ?
Gone from the meadows deep with swathes of hay:
There the blithe corncrake woke the summer day.
Or startled the still air the whole night long.
Now silent in their beauty they bend low
While the rich-scented breezes o’er them blow.

Oh ! merry voices of the world of life,
From the warm farm, the byre, the hen-roost shed ;
There nesting swallows flashed above my head,
And all about the air with sound was rife;
With din of sparrow hordes, incessant, shrill,
Debating, scolding, loving then so still.

So still, for I had called them ! Breathlessly
I stood awaiting the oncoming burst
And rush of rival voices, all athirst
To fill the air with carols mad with glee
Set with dark globes and crowns, the burnished leaves
Now sway in silence ‘neath the silent eaves.

O earth ! what murmurs sweet beguile thy rest,
Ere yet the thrush his glorious matin rings;
Ere yet the goldfinch on his glittering wings
Brushes the jasmine stars from round his nest;
Ere yet the daisy leaves turned toward the sun,
Bid night ” Good night,” and speak his day begun.

Oh, bitter loss ! all Nature’s voices dumb.
Oh, loss beyond all loss ! about my neck
The children cast their arms; no voices break
Upon my ear; no sounds of laughter come
Child’s laughter, wrought of love, and life, and bliss;
Heedless I leave the rest, had I but this !

1879.

For me, her best poem is ‘Glenville’ –

The shadows flicker on the coltsfoot sheaves :
There ‘neath the bridge and o’er the sparkling  stream,
Often we traced the water’s wavering gleam
Amid long trailing branches and green leaves ;
Often we rested, where the beech tree weaves
A liquid web for every wandering beam
O’er deep dark pools wherein the old trout dream,
And oft a shining foot the water cleaves.
A stream o’ergrown and shadowed all its length,
From the fairy fort and glen, to the old bridge,
Bringing its amber waters from the strength
Of yonder brown, bare, boggy, heathery ridge,
To where the fat land’s heavy-footed kine
In their rich beds of luscious green recline.

The library copy of her book shows it came from a member of her family – her cousin was Professor Stockley.

The library copy of her book shows it came from a member of her family – perhaps a niece?

http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/Media,4182,en.pdf

http://www.limerickleader.ie/news/local/worthies-of-thomond-no-3-charlotte-grace-o-brien-1-2186248

http://herbariaunited.org/collector/12644/

Gwynn, Stephen, Charlotte Grace O’Brien; selections from her writings and correspondence, with a memoir by Stephen Gwynn. Dublin, 1909

It can be very confusing trying to identify the various combinations of newspapers and missionary journals aimed at Deaf people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was often a struggle for these papers or journals to survive, as they had to find their widely distributed audience and persuade poor people to part with their money to buy copies. They would seem to have been labours of love, and were naturally impregnated with a strong religious element. The Rev. Gilby, about whom we have written previously, was involved with a few of these papers. This is a brief attempt to show the relationship of some of them.

The Deaf and Dumb Herald and Public Intelligencer (1876), by Ralph Clegg, see that link for more details.  Not really a religious paper, though it had of course rtones of that.  It is here because t may have been confused with Gilby’s Herald, see below.

Our Little Messenger to the Deaf and Dumb (1882-?) was a heavily religious short pamplet with some news items on the back page, published by Miss E. Jones of The Mall, Ballyshannon, County Donegal.  

Gilby’s first attempt at a ‘paper’, or perhaps a journal, appears to have been –

The Herald (1885-7), which is mentioned in the first edition of Our Quarterly Paper (1892-3), where it says, “Those of our readers who know the editor best, will remember that many good things were said and printed in it, though with much labour.”  We have not see any copies and it is possible none survive.  Gilby does not talk much about his papers in his memoirs and does not mention eother of these by name.

Our Monthly Church Messenger to the Deaf, (1894-5) edited by Gilby, A. Macdonald Cuttell and W.W. Adamson.  Adamson (1867-1947) was first chaplain for the Deaf at Newcastle Deaf School.  A native of that city, Adamson was educated at Dr. Bruce’s Academy.  From the age of 18 he took a great interest in the Deaf, as in his Boy’s Club he met a Deaf and Dumb boy and got him educated at the Northern Counties School for the Deaf, then recently moved from a house in Charlotte Sq. to Town Moor.  There he found many other Deaf children and from that day in 1885 his vocation was found.  He became a Lay Missioner then a Chaplain and Canon.

In 1896 Our Monthly Church Messenger to the Deaf, became –

Ephphatha, and in 1897 the sole editor was Mr A. Macdonald Cuttell.  This paper amalgamated with-

The British Deaf Monthly in 1899.

The news sheet or circular Our Notice Board, begun in 1901, seems to have been an R.A.D.D. production for the London mission.  Later on ephphatha would be published with local mission newsletters like this one.

Ten years later Gilby was once more involved with editing a newspaper, and he revived his title,

Ephphatha (1909). This paper, or small magazine, included the R.A.D.D. circular, and became the R.A.D.D. magazine. In 1948 it started a new series, but in 1959 it finally ended its run.

[Updated 16/10/2015]

For more information on our holdings of these and other Deaf papers, please contact the Action on Hearing Loss Library.