I requested this book as the mother of 2 hard of hearing daughters. For the entirety of my youngest child's life, I've tried to seek knowledge about her fluctuating hearing loss. She's a mystery. This book helped me see that I have never been alone in my quest to discover the mystery of the inner ear and hearing loss/deafness. No matter how often I tried to seek an answer to my child's condition, hearing loss is often just hearing loss.
Thank you to Netgalley, the author and publisher for this well-researched book and personal account.

I have no personal experience with the deaf community, and as always I looked forward to getting to know more about a whole new world which has always existed.
The author is a historian, and this shows in the content. It took me a while to get through it all since it cannot be read in one sitting since the idea remains the same with the mode and people and probably the problems varying. I wanted to finish it for Nonfiction November, but I ended up only finishing it now.
The author begins with her own life and how she became deaf. She circles back to herself in the epilogue once she has shown a hundred years of doctors, quacks, as well as actual conmen, work their way through the deaf community (mostly) in the US. She has a list of the advertising and way the 'treatments' were framed, and she identifies a trend in them all. The main focus of the book is on the various solutions people came up with to help the hard of hearing (or line their own pockets). Some of them are hard to believe as being actually in practice. By the time I put it down, I felt that I had a slightly better understanding of the conflicts of deaf people living in a world designed for those who can hear. I am not sure how accurate my understanding is, but it is a start.

I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

Very interesting nonfiction book about the supposed "cures and causes" of deafness.
The real shame of it is the deaf and hard of hearing were taken advantage of by quacks that were essentially snake oil sales men. In times past among other things they believed lack of proper sleep and the lack of the correct diet could cause deafness. Many things were tried to restore hearing and a lot of these things the creators knew where not effective but they still gladly took the people's money for it. Cumbersome,embarrassing and awkward many of the tried items didn't stay on the market long.
Reading this makes a person more empathetic towards the hearing impaired and how they are taken advantage of.
Very informative book!

Pub Date: 31 Aug 2020
I was given a complimentary copy of this book. Thank you.
All opinions expressed are my own.

This book is something special. The subtitle is a clever hook that will draw in fans of Mary Roach and medical history, but this book does more than walk us through historic cures for deafness. Virdi's investigation is personal as well as historical, and she shares what it was like to grow up deaf in a world obsessed with fixing her. This book raises ethical questions that encourage readers to look beyond the quackery of the past and consider the disability rights (or lack thereof) of the present.

Jaipreet Virdi’s Hearing Happiness is an interesting addition to the literature about the experience of Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Virdi tells us about her own experience of hearing loss while framing it with a comprehensive study of efforts to cure deafness throughout history. Many of the early works of Deaf history focused primarily on competing methods of education (especially the differences between oral and sign-based pedagogy) as well as the development of a strong Deaf culture and community via residential schools and Deaf social organizations. This book, however, encompasses a larger population of deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Preet considers how hearing society has seen deafness as a tragedy to be cured at any cost, often going to extremes. A well done book which will broaden understanding of elements of the experiences of deaf people.

It is easy to be swept away by promises of miraculous cures for incurable diseases.

The universe has a strange sense of humor, as I am writing this I am getting over a virus and I’ve temporarily lost hearing in my right ear going on 3 weeks now. For me, it’s fluid behind the eardrum, but for this reason I finished this novel thinking about how important losing your hearing is for those born with it. I’ve had several family members lose their hearing due to cancer, old age, as well as damage from working around loud machinery. Most of us are ignorant when it comes to disabilities that don’t directly affect us, in fact before reading this I hadn’t really understood that people need to learn to hear when they get a cochlear implant. It’s hard to understand that a person, with the aid of hearing implants, doesn’t hear the same as those of us with properly functioning ears do. Before my own father started using a hearing aid I didn’t know how it distorted some sounds, magnified others and how awful it is for him to hear when more than one person is talking. As with anything else about humanity, there are different ways of being deaf and ‘cures’ and ‘aids’ don’t work for everyone, nor are they necessarily desired.

The conversation about embracing Deaf culture is a personal one, particularly to those born deaf. To many people, it’s not a matter of ‘curing’ something they never lost in the first place. Other people’s expectations of what makes a person whole doesn’t take into account their needs, their decisions. Reading about parents searching for cures it’s heartbreaking for both the child and the parents. For those who want to restore their hearing every new invention and scientific breakthrough can just be one more disappointment to bear, some more dangerous to one’s health or outright deadly. While Jaipreet Virdi shares a history for the deafness cure, too she interjects her own personal trials and tribulations in defining her own place in the Deaf community. Jaipreet was not born deaf and therefore her hearing loss doesn’t “ fit with the discourse of deafness and Deaf culture, because most Deaf people were born deaf and thus, never had any hearing to lose.” Her goal is to “enrich our understanding of an unrepresented aspect of deaf history: that of the medical and technological avenues for “curing” hearing loss.” These cures involve everything from airplane dives, chunky devices, and all sorts of “Electrical Wonders.” Even advertisements that shame women for their unfashionable hearing apparatuses is simply just another way to demean a person and make a ton of money off a medical condition.

There are, of course, those in the medical community who made discoveries that were great strides in medical science but for every genuine, qualified doctor there were quacks and frauds. Factor in the exuberant cost for treatments, cures, and hearing devices and people have no other option than to purchase what they can afford, generally for products that did more harm than good if they worked at all. Loving parents that were well meaning hunted for cures largely because in the past the fear their child couldn’t manage in a world that doesn’t support disabilities caused alarm about their child’s future. Society tends to attack anything that is ‘different than’. Their fear that their child couldn’t survive without the ability to communicate as the majority demands placed them on quests to try anything to cure their Deaf child. But what of the child forced through treatments that are often more painful than not? As an aside, this happens with all sorts of illnesses, defects, disabilities that are physical or mental. The truth is, most parents want to make their child’s future one where their child will be safe, functional long after they are no longer around to care for them, it often comes from a place of love. Yet there are two sides of this coin.

What of the child like Jaipreet Virdi who has had to learn how to live between two worlds, that of hearing and the deaf, feeling she isn’t planted firmly in either? People often forget how important hearing is to language, for it is through hearing others speak as well as our own voice that we can pronounce and enunciate. A not so simple skill most of us take for granted. Hearing, in the end, matters and is just something most of us don’t think about. As we age, hearing as much as sight is a sense that tends to go. All of us are prone to illness and injury, that can easily end in the loss of hearing. It’s easier to not think about our senses, until we or someone we love loses them.

How can we not empathize with the need those born Deaf have to embrace their own community, feeling whole as they are? Sometimes we fail to understand that all over the world people have their own way of existing, it may be different from our own, but it’s not less. How much of oneself is anyone expected to give up to fit in, particularly when you lose more of yourself? We all must measure our own happiness, and create a place for ourselves, why should it be any different for someone with a disability? With that said, it wouldn’t hurt to educate ourselves about the difficulties others confront, to at least try to understand each other better and respect personal choices.

This book is full of hearing history, which is shocking and sad as well as fascinating. It’s part memoir and medical history/science. Maybe I was more interested in this book having witnessed the frustration of those who have lost their hearing. Seeing firsthand how someone is dismissed when they can’t communicate what they need to. I don’t always think other people are cruel (though such people do exist) I think they just don’t know any better, which again comes down to “unrepresented aspects” of hearing loss and many other disabilities. In a world as populated as ours, there really isn’t an excuse not to educate ourselves. There is a line that stayed with me, “We marvel at how people pass as normal by hiding the signs of disability.” Why should they have to hide?

If you’ve ever been curious about the world of the hearing impaired or Deaf (which is the same world you share) this is an informative read.

Publication Date: May 1, 2020

University of Chicago Press

A solid if somewhat repetitive account of how many people who were d/Deaf or hard of hearing have been targeted by false cures over time. Virdi, taking into account her own experiences, chronicles the potions, salves, techniques, implements, and devices intended to help people hear better, defraud those wishing to do so, and/or both. The prose is a bit stodgy and Virdi's personal sections aren't always well connected to the reset of the narrative, but the book is nonetheless useful for disability studies, the history of hearing and the d/Deaf, and medical hisory.

Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History

Jaipreet VirDi’s book about her life and experiences as a deaf person are compelling and touched me. Not simply a tour of her own life and journey, but a hefty, academic consideration of humanity’s response to deafness in its members. She describes humanity's main actors as clever, innovative and relentlessly positive, one “cure” after another is offered up, and the author documents all she finds throughout history. Oh, the things we have done to ears, and to those who carry those ears! I felt so miserable for these people, and the realization of the isolationist systems cultures and social sorting mechanisms we have installed through time, right down to today! I had never thought about this, about the ideas, situations and the money made on the ears of so many.

I am a hearing person whose total experience with this attribute (deafness) that proves so challenging in our society and which takes full-sized hearing as a baseline for “normalcy” is that in my sixth decade I am the owner of Old Ears. They’ve been tugged on, poked at, shoved up, had way too much volume inserted, and I dare not recall what other abuses to which I’ve subjected them. One of the most stunning aspects presented by the author, surprising me the most, was the idea that deafness is not an illness, nor are the deaf broken. They are deaf. They are different. But sadly, and Ms. VirDi made a clear case, a compelling one, that discusses all the ways the deaf are stigmatized and shamed. She goes page by page by page discussing the painful “cures” and machines and mechanical baubles that promise a miracle life after deafness. I was stunned to learn, and had to read it a number of times: deafness cannot be cured. What???? It is not an illness. A person can be taught strategies to work around it, responses to it and some are content not to do so. And those are often the ones most punished by society for not continuing to seek “cures”. . .

The author’s reference materials and endnotes are thorough, and point the way to continued resources for interested readers. I always appreciate that kind of generosity, and confidence in the body of work being presented – giving all comers the opportunity to test the water and gauge the trustworthiness of the author’s main points.

The book is quite like a textbook in the historical descriptions, but it is very relevant to a reader as times closer to their lifetime is approached, and societal “solutions” are presented with media proof. These come and go and with artful weaving the author pulls us back to her experiences, her family’s responses, and the responses others have face(d) during the difficult challenge they sometimes choose: that of “passing” as a hearing person. The larger message of this book is so important, and straight from her conclusion: Deafness is not a tragedy. That is important for me to say. It is not a tragedy. The painful nature of deafness is the contradiction in. . . .a conflict of impulses to repair and the need to acknowledge diversity. . . .”

I highly recommend this important work by Jaipreet VirDi.


A sincere thanks to Jaipreet VirDi, University of Chicago Press and NetGalley for providing me an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

First thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed the book, especially since I live in Rochester, NY which is home to the Rochester School for the Deaf, one of the oldest schools in the US. I have worked with them several times in the past and they are a wonderful school but enough of that.

The book truly details the history of hearing products, cures, research, etc,, over the years and accompanied with advertisements and pictures makes it very interesting. I only rated it 3 stars because sometimes I got lost as it seemed to get too weighed down and technical for me - the average hearing reader so maybe I am not being completely fair.

Still all in all it was worth the read.