Word: deafness
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Francois Truffaut's touching film, the Wild Child, has made the subsequent story well-known: a rising doctor, Jean-Marc Itard, took Victor in hand when other specialists gave up and tried unsuccessfully for five taxing years to teach the deaf-mute boy to use language. Apart from Itard's own account of his tribulations, no one has since returned to determine exactly why the wild child experiment failed. This is what Lane, a psychological from Northeastern, sets out to do. And beyond some amusing and touching anecdotes, he has produced much less a narrative history than a highly academic...
...deaf and dumb...
Childhood endowed Ernst with a rich compost of obsessions. His father was a fiercely authoritarian Roman Catholic, an amateur painter who taught in a school for deaf-mutes in the Rhineland town of Brühl. Little Max briefly persuaded this eccentric sire that he was the child Jesus. Memories of this sort underlie Ernst's most notorious thrust of anticlerical wit, a spanking Madonna entitled The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses (1926). When his baby sister was born and his favorite bird, a pink cockatoo, died on the same day in 1906, a whole...
...48th Academy Awards went by hand. It said: "Thank you for teaching me to have a dream. You are seeing my dream come true." Louise Fletcher, who had just won an Oscar for Best Actress of the Year, was passing along the good news in sign language to her deaf parents watching television in Birmingham, conscribing the words, etching the phrases, with smooth movements of arms and hands, as tears edged down her cheeks...
From the outset, each sister was clearly unique. After Mary Lyon, "the founders of the Seven proceed in a descending spiral of unlikelihood," says Kendall. Sophia Smith, for example, inherited a fortune from a skinflint bachelor brother and intended to open a school for deaf-mutes until she was told that there were not enough of them to fill one. After rejecting a proposal that she make a bequest to Amherst-she believed that professors there were subversives bent on controlling central Massachusetts-Smith settled on starting the college, which opened in 1875. Matthew Vassar, a Poughkeepsie brewer, simply wanted...