The same writer quotes Hartmann's table, compiled in 1880 from continental statistics, as follows:--
Cerebral affections, inflammations, convulsions 644 Cerebro-spinal meningitis 295 Typhus 260 Scarlatina 205 Measles 84 Ear disease, proper 77 Lesions of the head 70 Other diseases 354 ---- 1989
There appears to be no cure for deafness that is other than partial; but with the advance of science preventive treatment is expected to be efficacious in scarlet fever, measles, &c.
1. _In Childhood._--It is difficult to impress people with two facts in connexion with teaching language to the average child who was born deaf, or lost hearing in early infancy. One is the necessity of the undertaking, and the other is that this necessity is not due to mental deficiency in the pupil. To the born deaf-mute in an English-speaking country English is a foreign language. His inability to speak is due to his never having heard that tongue which his mother uses. The same reason holds good for his entire ignorance of that language. The hearing child does not know a word of English when he is born, and never would learn it if taken away from where it is spoken. He learns English unconsciously by imitating what he hears. The deaf child never hears English, and so he never learns it till he goes to school. Here he has to start learning English--or whatever is the language of his native land--in the same way as a hearing boy learns a foreign language.
But another reason exists which renders his task much more difficult than that of a normal English schoolboy learning, say, German. The latter has two channels of information, the eye and the ear; the deaf boy has only one, the eye. The hearing boy learns German by what he hears of it in class as well as by reading it; the deaf boy can only learn by what he sees. It is as if you tried to fill two cisterns of the same capacity with two inlets to one and only one inlet to the other; supposing the inlets to be the same size, the former will fill twice as fast. So it is in the case of the hearing boy as compared with his deaf brother. The cerebral capacity and quality are the same, but in one case one of the avenues to the brain is closed, and consequently the development is less rapid. Moreover, the thoughts are precisely those which would be expected in people who form them only from what they see. We were often asked by our deaf playmates in our childhood such questions (in signs) as "What does the cat say?"--"The dog talks, does he not?"--"Is the rainbow very hot on the roof of that house?" They have often told us such things as that they used to think someone went to the end of the earth and climbed up the sky to light the stars, and to pour down rain through a sieve.