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The Artificial Ear
Price: $25.95
Subtitle: Cochlear Implants
and the Culture of Deafness
Author:
Stuart Blume
Subject: Health
and Medicine
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4583-7
Pages:
208 pages
Publication Date: January 2010
Praise for The Artificial Ear
"Stuart Blume takes us on
a remarkable journey into the medical, economic and political making of
the cochlear implant, an innovation that affects the relationship of
deaf persons to the world and to their own identity. We are shown the
clash of visions between makers and intended users, as well as the
uncertainty and hope that shape parents' decision-making for their deaf
children. This unsettling but rewarding journey forces us to question
our understanding of medical progress and our personal sense of
identity."-Isabelle Baszanger, author of Inventing Pain Medicine: From the
Laboratory to the Clinic
"In this compelling account, Stuart
Blume bridges the scholarly and the personal to track the development
and the contested uses of a medical device. Blume skillfully explains
how the cochlear implant has figured in medical practice and political
discourse, and he is especially attentive to the perspectives of those
who are often marginalized in policy debates. In this book, the
author’s accumulated expertise on the topic of technological innovation
shines through just as powerfully as his concern with promoting
fairness and social justice."-Steven Epstein, author of Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in
Medical Research and Impure
Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge
Description:
When it was first
developed, the cochlear implant was hailed as a “miracle cure” for
deafness. That relatively few deaf adults seemed to want it was
puzzling. The technology was then modified for use with deaf children,
90 percent of whom have hearing parents. Then, controversy struck as
the Deaf community overwhelmingly protested the use of the device and
procedure. For them, the cochlear implant was not viewed in the context
of medical progress and advances in the physiology of hearing, but
instead represented the historic oppression of deaf people and of sign
languages.
Part ethnography and part historical study, The Artificial Ear is based on
interviews with researchers who were pivotal in the early development
and implementation of the new technology. Through an analysis of the
scientific and clinical literature, Stuart Blume reconstructs the
history of artificial hearing from its conceptual origins in the 1930s,
to the first attempt at cochlear implantation in Paris in the 1950s,
and to the widespread clinical application of the “bionic ear” since
the 1980s.
About the Author:
Stuart Blume is professor emeritus of science
dynamics at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is the
author of several books, including Insight
and Industry: The Dynamics of Technological Change in Medicine.
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Price: $25.95
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