The Talking Deaf Man

The Talking Deaf Man is an English translation of Surdus Loquens, the pioneering 1692 medical treatise by Johann Konrad Amman (1669-1724), the Swiss physician who settled in Haarlem and developed one of the earliest systematic methods for teaching speech to deaf people. Amman’s work argued that deaf people could be taught to speak by training them to imitate the lip and tongue movements of hearing speakers, and his method became the foundation of the oralist tradition in deaf education that would dominate European and American schools for the deaf into the twentieth century. His later Dissertatio de Loquela of 1700 expanded the system. The book is a primary source for the early history of speech therapy and deaf pedagogy in Europe. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.