Excerpt from: Media dis&dat (click for full article)
A 300-year-old, leather-bound instruction manual contains some
of the earliest examples of attempts to teach the deaf to communicate.
The manual belonged to Alexander Popham, a deaf teenager from a noble
English family who was taught to speak in the 1660s. The leather-bound
notebook was discovered in 2008 at a stately English manor called
Littlecote House.
The finding suggests that one of the boy's tutors, John Wallis, was a few hundred years ahead of his time in understanding that deaf people needed their own language to communicate, said linguist David Cram of the University of Oxford.
Amazingly, Popham learned to communicate and speak (although historical records don't reveal how well), became a minor celebrity of the era and was even presented at court, Cram said. He eventually married the daughter of one of the leading intellectual women of the 17th century.
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