I See a Voice by Jonathan Rée

Author:Jonathan Rée
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466876149
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

FIG 14. A speech lesson at the Royal School for the Deaf, Exeter, 1899

But Gallaudet soon realized that the Milan Congress was not going to allow an open discussion of the merits of the rival methods. It was to be a ritual denunciation of sign language. Before the conference began, delegates inspected sixty deaf boys who had received oralist training in the Poor School in Milan. According to the correspondent for The Times, their display of ‘reading from the lips’ was astonishing. Delegates addressed the boys in normal speech, and ‘one and all answered in spoken language, though we in our country call them dumb’. In fact the deaf paupers of Milan, who were not allowed to make signs at all, struck the British as rather more civilized than ordinary Italians, amongst whom, as was notorious, ‘gesture and action so commonly accompany speech’.31

The President of the Congress, Giulio Tarra, explained to the delegates that movements of the lips were the only adequate expression for mental conceptions. When God installed a soul within us, he gave us speech as well, and there was nothing that lay beyond the power of ‘that wonderful instrument, the mouth, played upon by the hand of the Deity’. He knew from bitter experience that those who were taught in sign language would never learn abstract ideas, but only ‘grossly material images’. And he insisted, despite the lonely protest of Edward Gallaudet, that the two methods could not possibly be combined: ‘the method of signs,’ he warned, ‘stands in deadly opposition to that of speech.’32

Herr Hugentobler, German president of a deaf school in Lyon, agreed that sign language should be eliminated; and Signor Fornari of Milan echoed him with emphasis: it must indeed be abolished. The only reason for the chronic moral depravity of the deaf was that they had not been weaned from signs. Susanna Hull, the teacher from London who had given Alexander Graham Bell his first chance of working with deaf children back in 1868, maintained that if they were ever permitted to use signs, their spoken and written language would become infected with ‘deaf-mutisms’, their vocal apparatus would atrophy, and they would soon start to suffer from the lung diseases, distorted shoulders, poor posture, and ungainly carriage characteristic of signing deaf-mutes. Kinsey added theological weight to the medical argument by pointing out that under the German system, ‘voices are used as destined by the Good Creator’, whereas under the French one they are ‘silenced by the prejudiced ignorance of man’. The only possible conclusion, underlined by St John Ackers, was that the use of sign language should be outlawed altogether.33

On 11 September 1880, the matter was put to a vote. By 160 to 4, the Congress decided that neither the French Method nor the Mixed Method should henceforth be countenanced in the education of the deaf. If the unfortunate members of this ‘neglected class’ were to be redeemed, they must be prevented from using signs altogether. The number of deaf delegates at the Congress, Gallaudet noted bitterly, was zero.

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