Deaf education: from pedagogy to medicine in the deliberations of congresses of deaf teachers at the end of the 19th century

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century, several congresses on education for the deaf took place, held both by hearing teachers and by the deaf themselves. Within this framework, this article aims to show how medicine gradually merges with pedagogy to the extent that there is an understanding that a new population could be educated and scrutinized. Thus, we seek to problematize how the Session of the Listeners at the congress, held in Paris, 1900, is marked by the appreciation of medicine as an essential element in the educational process of the deaf, unlike the other congresses, since it constitutes a great resumption of the deliberations of Milan (1880), and marks the aggregation of medicine as a determining foundation for conducting educational practices for deaf students. From a Foucauldian approach, based on an archeogenealogical exercise, we take the congress document as part of a larger archive of nineteenth-century sources on deaf education.