Free Vintage Sacks by Oliver Sacks Page A

that is essentially unimaginable, by the normal (and even by the postlingually deafened, like David Wright), if hearing is absent at birth, or lost in infancy before the language is acquired. Those so afflicted—the prelingually deaf—are in a category qualitatively different from all others. For these people, who have never heard, who have no possible auditory memories, images, or associations, there can never be even the illusion of sound. They live in a world of utter, unbroken soundlessness and silence. 18 These, the congenitally deaf, number perhaps a quarter of a million in this country. They make up a thousandth of the world’s children.
    It is with these and these only that we will be concerned here, for their situation and predicament are unique. Why should this be so? People tend, if they think of deafness at all, to think of it as less grave than blindness, to see it as a disadvantage, or a nuisance, or a handicap, but scarcely as devastating in a radical sense.
    Whether deafness is “preferable” to blindness, if acquired in later life, is arguable; but to be born deaf is infinitely more serious than to be born blind—at least potentially so. For the prelingually deaf, unable to hear their parents, risk being severely retarded, if not permanently defective, in their grasp of language unless early and effective measures are taken. And to be defective in language, for a human being, is one of the most desperate of calamities, for it is only through language that we enter fully into our human estate and culture, communicate freely with our fellows, acquire and share information. If we cannot do this, we will be bizarrely disabled and cut off—whatever our desires, or endeavors, or native capacities. And indeed, we may be so little able to realize our intellectual capacities as to appear mentally defective.
    It was for this reason that the congenitally deaf, or “deaf and dumb,” were considered “dumb” (stupid) for thousands of years and were regarded by an unenlightened law as “incompetent”—to inherit property, to marry, to receive education, to have adequately challenging work—and were denied fundamental human rights. This situation did not begin to be remedied until the middle of the eighteenth century, when (perhaps as part of a more general enlightenment, perhaps as a specific act of empathy and genius) the perception and situation of the deaf were radically altered.
    The
philosophes
of the time were clearly fascinated by the extraordinary issues and problems posed by a seemingly languageless human being. Indeed, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, when brought to Paris in 1800, was admitted to the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes, which was at the time supervised by the Abbé Roch-Ambroise Sicard, a founding member of the Society of Observers of Man, and a notable authority on the education of the deaf. As Jonathan Miller writes:
    As far as the members of this society were concerned the “savage” child represented an ideal case with which to investigate the foundations of human nature. . . . By studying a creature of this sort, just as they had previously studied savages and primitives, Red Indians and orangutans, the intellectuals of the late eighteenth century hoped to decide what was characteristic of Man. Perhaps it would now be possible to weigh the native endowment of the human species and to settle once and for all the part that was played by society in the development of language, intelligence, and morality.
    Here, of course, the two enterprises diverged, one ending in triumph, the other in complete failure. The Wild Boy never acquired language, for whatever reason or reasons. One insufficiently considered possibility is that he was, strangely, never exposed to sign language, but continually (and vainly) forced to try to speak. But when the “deaf and dumb” were properly approached, i.e., through sign language, they proved