![]() ![]() ![]() From Brett’s intriguing mix of the aristocratic and the bohemian to the Scottish physician Dr. The inclusion of Brett’s 1925 self-portrait, where Toby is held in her hand, supports this and is one of the many visual sources with which Virdi illustrates her book. Virdi’s treatment of Brett is exemplary of how, throughout the book, Virdi positions deaf and hard-of-hearing people not as “passive recipients of a medical device” but instead as “active participants who evaluated, modified, and in some instances, even designed their own prosthetics” (p. In describing Brett’s relationship to Toby, and later, the unfortunate loss of the device to electrical hearing aids, Virdi allows the reader to reflect on the way Brett used technology to control her negotiation with hearing, sound, and silence. As Virdi astutely observes, “that she named her trumpet … indicates the intimate connection she cultivated with her acoustic aid” (p. Increasingly, Brett found herself reliant on Toby, her flat tin ear trumpet, for communications. A talented artist, in 1910 Brett enrolled at the Slade School of Art where she became part of the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists and, by 1915, she had become increasingly affected by deafness, which, in garnering mixed reactions from her friends, had the potential to be alienating. She later reflected that she “simply desired to shut it all out” (p. While the surgery saved her life, Brett ascribed the trauma of the episode as one of the sources of her gradual hearing loss, another being psychological bullying by her brothers. In 1901, Brett survived a burst appendix and subsequent appendectomy, a dangerous operation, performed in this case by Sir Frederick Treves (a prominent doctor, royal surgeon, and infamous for his connections with Joseph Merrick, sometimes labeled the “Elephant Man”). Born in London in 1883 and the daughter Reginald Baliol Brett, later Lord Esher, a close adviser to Queen Victoria, Brett was of aristocratic background and, quite literally, familiar with the corridors of power, playing as a child in Windsor Castle, sometimes with the elderly Queen Victoria in attendance. Dorothy Eugénie Brett is just one example. Extensive and wide-ranging archival work allows Virdi to tell the stories of a huge range of individuals, hearing, deaf, and hard-of-hearing, who populate her monograph. One of the particularly impressive things about Hearing Happiness is the way in which it is peopled. There is the story of Jaipreet Virdi”s own life and experiences of deafness, the story of numerous deaf and hard-of-hearing people negotiating the hearing worlds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the story of those inventors and medics, often hearing, who, in claiming to “cure” deafness, articulated deafness as a “problem” to be treated and contributed to a culture where deafness is seen as a “deficit.” From ear trumpets to chili peppers to aural surgery to electricity, the multifarious “cures” to deafness have had ramifications both in terms of the lived experience of deaf and hard-of-hearing people who came into contact with them, and in terms of the cultural construction of what it means to be “normal.” The skillful way Virdi brings these narratives to life for the reader, and weaves between them, is testament to the power of an extraordinary writer. Hearing Happiness is a spell-binding book of research and stories. ![]() Reviewed by Esme Cleall (University of Sheffield)Ĭommissioned by Iain C. Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (Chicago Visions and Revisions).Ĭhicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.
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