Practical Aids for the Deaf

1916

Almost any pains are worth taking if by their means the senses of sight and hearing may be preserved; but sometimes, in spite of all that can be done, deafness goes on to the chronic form. In that case no treatment has been discovered that will cure it, especially if it is the kind that is associated with atrophy of the internal parts of the ear. It is of course true that atrophy, or wasting, of any part of the body means loss of function. If you had an atrophied hand or foot, you could see for yourself that it was useless. But the internal ear is hidden from us, and so some of us go on hoping against hope that a miracle will he worked in our own case and that some doctor somewhere will be able to raise the dead.

In that way a great deal of time is lost and a great deal of suffering caused. Chronic and incurable deafness is a cross that must be embraced if we would not be crushed beneath it. The first thing to do is to accept the inevitable with all the cheerfulness we can command; the next thing is to put away every bit of foolish, self-consciousness and false shame about the affection, and the third thing is to get as quickly as possible one of the many excellent contrivances that have been invented to help deaf people. In all our large cities, at the shops of the best opticians, you can find cases filled with these contrivances. The rules about permitting people to take them out on trial are usually very fair. Ten days' use of any one of these will show you whether it will help you or not.

A very useful form of appliance is the electrical apparatus in connection with its own battery. It is a bother, no doubt, to carry it about and manipulate it, but not hearing at all is a greater bother. That is undoubtedly the strongest crutch for the deaf; and its makers assert that it helps to train the ear back to the recognition of human speech. For partial deafness there are smaller and simpler devices, and for those who have accepted deafness as a fact beyond any curative measures, and who still have their own teeth for bone conduction of sound, the audiphone (sometimes called the dentiphone), a black gutta-percha fan held between the front teeth, is often the greatest help. It also possesses the advantage of costing only a few dollars.

—The Fryeburg Post, Fryeburg, Maine, Sept. 26, 1916, p. 4.

Owls Well Equipped by Nature

1919

Simple Explanation of Remarkable Sense of Hearing Possessed by the Owl

It Is held by naturalists that in order to capture its prey the owl must depend even more upon its sense of hearing than upon its sense of sight. The tufts of feathers that distinguish the short-eared and the long-eared owls are, of course, no more ears than they are horns. The true ear of the owl is a most remarkable organ.

The facial disk of feathers that gives the owl its characteristic appearance serves as a kind of sounding-board or ear-trumpet to concentrate the slightest sounds and to transmit them to the orifice of the true ear, concealed in the small feathers behind the eye. Even in the barn owl, which possesses the least complicated arrangement of this kind, the orifice of the ear is covered by a remarkable flap of the skin, while in the other species there are striking differences in the size and shape of this orifice and its covering flap on the two sides of the head.

The exact way in which owls utilize this elaborately specialized apparatus has still to be discovered.

Cleo Shows Her Ears

1922

Famous French Beauty Disproves A Suspicion

Friend of Edward VII of England and Leopold of Belgium Reveals Them to Reporters

PARIS, (By Mail) — "Kings may come, and kings may go, but I go on forever," sang Cleo de Merode the other day when, after an absence from the public eye of a quarter of a century, the erstwhile famous dancer jumped right back into the first pages of all the Paris newspapers by proving that she had ears.

Time was, in the days when Edward, prince of Wales, and Leopold, king of the Belgians were citizens of Paris by unanimous vote of the boulevards, when it pleased Cleo de Merode to twist her hair flat and low around her shapely head and launch the Merode curl. The style still persists, as did, until a few days ago, the legend that the dancer was imbued not so much with the desire to create a new fashion in coiffure, but to hide the fact that a jealous rival had slashed her ears, or, as some of the stories had it, that a discarded lover, had bitten them off.

It was the heyday of the "grandes vedettes" — of the demimonde — Liane de Pougy, Emilienne d'Alencon and a half dozen others whose gowns and horses and whims set the pace for the entire cosmopolitan crowd who brought their millions and their appetites for the new and startling to the city on the Seine. Kings and kinglets shared honors in their train with diamond kings from the Rand and from iron kings from Pittsburgh.

Was Veritable Queen

Cleo de Merode's beauty and her undoubted choreographic gifts, which had brought her from the music halls to the Paris Opera stage, combined with the unhidden interests which the Belgian sovereign displayed in her, made the dancer a veritable queen. It brought upon her also the bitter hate of less favored aspirants to royal honors. Hence the tale of the blemish under the flat curls.

Now comes this beauty of an age that has vanished to remind the world that she is still here and that her reputation is as much to her in the second decade of the twentieth century as was her fame in the closing years of the nineteenth. All because an American film producer thought fit to bestow the name Cleo on the heroine of a "life story" screen drama having to do with the loves and adventures of a Parisian dancer "the Great Parisian Dancer," to be accurate.

"Why, my name is Cleo and I am The Great Parisian Dancer," exclaimed Mlle. de Merode, and straightway she decided the public must be warned that the film didn't represent in the slightest particular the intimate life of the oldtime music-hall favorite. Certainly, most certainly, King Leopold and King Edward and King Whatshishame and Prince Fromthesouth were her friends and admirers, but what of that? She appealed to the courts to silence the wicked tongues that whispered tales of scandal about her friendships.

Proves Her Ears

While waiting for the court machinery to get into operation, Cleo de Merode allowed her present address to be known to the principal newspaper offices and selected the most stunning of her photographs of the days of triumph.

"It is horrible," she wailed to her visitors, "that I, the most modest, the most classical, the most dressed, of music-hall dancers, should be represented as an exponent of the lewd."

When one of the reporters suggested that perhaps after all there was some basis of truth in the film representation, Mlle. de Merode got furious.

"You remember," she exclaimed, "the story about my not having any ears, that I dressed my hair so as to cover up the deficiency. Well, look here."

And with a quick gesture, she threw back her hair and displayed to the gaze of the newspapermen the pink and pearlies that nature gave her and nobody had destroyed or deformed.

This victory over maleficent gossipers was quickly followed by another when the presiding judge of the court of referees granted her plea that the offending film be ordered withdrawn from the boulevard theater where it was being shown until a final decision is handed down.

—The Lincoln State Journal, Lincoln, NE, Nov. 15, 1922, p. 11.

How to Improve Ears That Project Far From Head

1908

Because of the number of inquiries as to whether it is possible to improve projecting ears, I am writing this special advice. Such a deformity — for ears that stick far out from the head can scarcely be termed otherwise — is one for which there is no remedy after years of maturity are reached. For when one advances beyond the period of early youth the cartilage becomes hard and unyielding, and only a surgical operation has any effect. Such treatment is expensive, and so few persons can avail themselves of its benefits.

It is barely possible that months of bandaging might accomplish a reduction in the distance from the head, but of this I am rather doubtful. If it were possible to soak the ears so thoroughly in oil as to soften the hard substances and at the same time hold them close to the head, the protruding might become less. Theoretically this is undoubtedly so; practically, I doubt if the longest course of this treatment would be effective. It is the surgeon's knife or the continuance of projecting ears.

The most annoying part of homely ears is that proper care in youth would have kept them inconspicuous, if it did not make them pretty, and even a natural tendency to projection, if taken in time, could have been checked.

—MARGARET MIXTER.