Papers on deaf-mutism / by James Kerr Love.

  • Love, James Kerr, 1858-1942
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Papers on deaf-mutism / by James Kerr Love. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    correctly, but also to answer any questions put to them. One of them, who died at 21, understood Latin and Italian, and was learning Greek before his departure. Ponce's successor, Jean Pablo Bonet, published a work entitled The Keduction of Letters and the Art of Teaching the Deaf and Dumb to read, in which he records his methods as consisting of artificial pronunciation, the manual alphabet,,writing, and gestures, or the language of signs. The accounts of the success of these teachers is supposed to have travelled to England through the visit of Charles I. to Spain ; and John Bulwer, in the year 1648, exhibited the philosophical verity of that subtil art, which may enable one with an observant eye to hear what any man speaks by moving of his lips, proving that a man born deaf may hear the sound of words with his eye. John Wallis, a professor of mathematics at Oxford, also wrote on teaching articulation, while about the same time was published at Amsterdam a book entitled De Loquela, by Amman, which probably was the book from which Heinicke, the founder of the German system, obtained many of his ideas. Wallis, besides writing on articulation, had more extended notions of teaching the deaf and dumb, for he also made use in his instructions of such actions and gestures as have a natural signification. He also showed that letters or writing might be at once associated with our conceptions without the intervention of sounds, a principle which forms the basis of the school of De I'Epee and modern teachers of the silent method, though the same truth had indeed been anticipated by the Italian philosopher^ Jerome Cardan. No general application of these methods to the education of the deaf generally seems to have been attempted till towards the close of the last century. Then it was that the Abbe de I'Epee in France, and Heinicke in Germany, instituted those methods of instruction known respectively as the French and German systemsj and by the rivalry which they caused did contribute not a little to the rousing of the public interest in the subject, and thereby benefiting the cause of the mute. Charles Michel de I'Epee was born at Versailles in 1712. He took orders and became a Catholic priest, and in the course of his vocation, having discovered two deaf and dumb girls growing up in ignorance, his heart was filled with pity at their desolate condition, and thenceforward his whole life was devoted to the
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