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have been sent into deaf schools ten or twelve years ago. The advantage of this
method appears to be two-fold, the children are educated more in a hearing environment
and such as are found later to be too deaf for a hard of hearing class can be
transferred to a deaf school without loss of special education, while it has the further
advantage of being less costly.
That the present treatment of ear, nose and throat conditions is vastly better
than it was fifteen years ago is shown by the difference in the cases seen at the County
Hall; but this is much more noticeable in the suppurative than in the non-suppurative
diseases of the ear. In the latter there is grave necessity for improvement.
Analysis of causes of deafness.—The number of hard of hearing, deaf and defective
deaf children were 229. Of these 22 have been already seen and dealt with in
former years, leaving 207 for analysis. These were as follows:—
Boys. Girls. Totals.
Congenital 24 12 36
Acquired 66 96 162
Doubtful 4 5 9
94 113 207
The doubtful cases—of which two were probably congenital, one was said to
be due to the "shock of air-raids," and another (in a Russian child) to being
"frightened by Bolsheviks"—may be discarded, leaving 198 to be dealt with.
The congenital cases were 36 or 34.6 per cent. of all cases, and were made up as
follows:—
True hereditary deafness 4
Sporadic deaf birth 31
Aphasia 1
36
The family trees of the four cases of true hereditary deafness are in three
instances examples of Mendelian inheritance, the recessive character breeding true.
In the first two instances there is in each case a family history of deaf birth on
both sides. In the third case a born deaf woman with a family history of deaf
birth married a man whose deafness was acquired.