Volume 1

The lost senses / By John Kitto.

  • John Kitto
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The lost senses / By John Kitto. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the useful labours at which all men should aim, and for the struggles necessary to self-advancement in a country and in a time like this. My case is this. It has pleased Providence that three-fourths of a life now at its meridian, should be passed in the most intense deafness to which any living creature can be subjected ; and which could not be more entire had the organs conducive to the sense of hearing been altogether wanting. It is the consequences resulting from this position, that form the theme which I have now placed before me. For one who is deaf, my life has been studious ; and for one who has been both deaf and studious— or indeed for any one—my life has not been un- eventful. I know not, however, that I have any right to obtrude the events or studies of my life upon the public notice ; and it is not my intention to refer to them further than may be necessary to bring out the points and peculiarities of the deaf con- dition. From the multifarious matters arising from the activities of a life which once seemed doomed to inertion, I shall select those only which arise from, which illustrate, or which are in any remark- able way connected with my deafness. It is needful to explain this, lest in sketching the natural history of my deafness, I should be supposed to offer a biography of myself. I became deaf on my father’s birthday, early in the year 1817, when I had lately completed the twelfth year of my age. The commencement of this condition is too clearly connected with my cir- cumstances in life to allow me to abstain from troubling the reader with some particulars which I should have been otherwise willing to withhold. My father, at the expiration of his apprentice-
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