View report page

70
complaints as blepharitis, chronic ear discharge, deafness, and
scars upon the cornea. If we take the case of deafness, the
Acton Education Authority have about 10 cases of Hereditary or
Congenital deafness under their control. 3 of these are at an
institution at a cost of £35 a year each, 4 are at a school at a cost
of £12 a year each and will have to be kept later at an institution
and 3 are waiting admission to a school.
These children have to be sent to an institution after reaching
the age of 14, because at that age they have only reached the
development of children of about 10. The deaf child at 7 is
unequal in many respects to the hearing child of 2 years.
Although the children are known to be deaf, no effort is made to
teach them a language until they reach the age of 6 or 7. The
loss of the years between 2 and 7 is irretrievable.
The State does not recognise that the child needs anything
for these years, and yet these are the years of language and speech
formation, and the most plastic in the child's career. If the mother
had been taught a few principles of speech or lip reading, in the
opinion of Dr. Kerr Love, we might expect the development of
the nascent speech instinct at the time when that development is
easiest and most natural. The faculty of imitation, so strong in
children, would give the young deaf child a small vocabulary, on
which the teacher could at once build when the child entered school.
But there is another and a much larger class of deaf people
in which the seeds of deafness have been sown in the period under
notice. I refer to the acquired deafness which results from chronic
ear discharge. Temporary deafness is often cured, discharging
ears can be dried up, abscesses of the brain due to ear disease can
be evacuated. But old standing deafness cannot usually be cured.
Most of this kind of deafness results from a chronic discharge
of the ears acquired in an attack of Measles or Scarlet Fever
in the age-period 1-5 years, and practically no supervision is
exercised and very little warning is given as to the seriousness of
the complaint.