That pen or pencil is usually as efficient as a milk-tester in determining the surprisingly small amount of fat which exists in the milk of ordinary conversation.
You see, as I told you I should be likely to do, I have wandered away from the text. That is characteristic of the deaf, for we seldom hear the text, anyway. The woman I started to tell about managed to work through college and began treatment for her deafness. This promised some relief, when suddenly the great earthquake shook San Francisco. The shock and fright of that catastrophe destroyed her hearing entirely. I have heard of several cases where deafness came like this, in a flash. As one man repeated to me:
“At twenty-nine minutes past ten I actually heard a pin drop on the floor of my room. At half-past ten it would have been necessary to prick me to let me know that the pin was there.”
And this woman’s mother died. Her daughter was forced to sit beside her at the last, unable to hear the message which the mother, just passing into the unseen country, tried to give. In all the book of time, I suppose there is recorded no more terrifying sadness than the fact of this inability to hear the parting words. Sometimes I regret that I promised not to make this book a tale of woe, for what could I not tell, if I would, of the soul-destroying sadness of this longing to hear a whispered confidence?
The woman of whom I speak did not shrivel under the heat of calamity. She continued treatment, and has made some slight gain in hearing. And now she has qualified as an expert physician. People wonder how a deaf person can possibly diagnose organic diseases, such as heart trouble, or even pneumonia. They can do it, for I have known several very deaf physicians who yet have met with marked success. One in particular was for years a chief examiner for a large insurance company. There was something almost uncanny about the way this man could look into the human body and put his finger upon any weak spot. I finally decided that he had developed as a substitute for hearing a hidden power to record with the eye and mind the symptoms not visible to most of his profession. The others depended on man-made charts and rules. Their perfect ears had made them slaves to common practice. My deaf friend, deprived of the ordinary avenue of approach for consultation, had pushed off like a pioneer into the unknown, where he had found the mysterious power.