The sign language of the deaf and dumb / by J. Birkbeck Nevins.

  • Nevins, J. Birkbeck (John Birkbeck), 1818-1903
Date:
[between 1890 and 1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The sign language of the deaf and dumb / by J. Birkbeck Nevins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    above. But in 1712 was born in France a man who became an ecclesiastic ; and, as the Abbe de l’Epee, was filled with pity for these wretched outcasts from society. In 1740 he began to devise a system by which indefinite numbers might be taught to communicate with each other, and possibly with hearing people also, and by which their intelligence might be cultivated and their moral and reli- gious sentiments evoked; so that they might be raised from the level of dangerous brute beasts, and become elevated and useful members of society. With this object he gradually invented what is now called the “sign lan- guage” of the deaf and dumb, and after years of work he was followed by the Abbe Sicard, who brought his system to the still more complete condition in which it still exists in active daily work, in every French and English speak- ing community. The more the details of this system are studied, the higher is the estimation in which it will be held, and the stronger will become the feeling that its author must have been possessed by little less than inspiration from above to have conceived and executed such a method as it is the object of this paper now to illustrate and explain.* The first object to be accomplished was to find some medium that could be readily grasped and remembered even by such a vacant and apparently blank mind as that of the ordinary deaf and dumb of his day, and thus to gain some means of mental and practical communion with him and others; and it is in the selection of such media that the first rudiments of his system are to be found. Take, * “ His great object being to impart instruction to the deaf and dumb, he spent his whole income, beside what was contributed by benevolent patrons, in the education and maintenance of his pupils, for whose wants he provided with such disinterested devotion that he often deprived himself of the neces- saries of life, restricting himself to the plainest food, and clothing himself in the coarsest apparel. He died in 1789.”—Gates’ Diet. Gen. Biog., 4th ed., 1885, p. 391.
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