Edith Whetnall

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Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital

Edith Whetnall , married Niven, (born September 6, 1910 in Hull , Yorkshire , United Kingdom ; † October 23, 1965 in London ), was a British otologist , an internationally known pediatric audiologist and advocate of auditory-verbal education .

Life

Edith Aileen Maude Whetnall grew up as the youngest daughter of the pastor of the Wesleyan Reformed Church in Hull. She graduated from King's College Hospital with a bachelor's degree in medicine and science. She became a member (Fellow) of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and did her Masters in London in 1940 and 1944.

During the Second World War she was assistant to the well-known laryngologist Victor Ewings Negus . She became interested in otology (possibly because her three-year-old niece was diagnosed with deafness) while working at the Horton and Sutton Hospitals, branches of King's College Hospital.

In 1946 she was appointed advisory otologist at London County Council , replacing Terence Cawthorne with whom she had worked in Horton. This connection showed her the need for clinics to recognize deafness in very young children.

In 1947, a year before the National Health Service (NHS) was founded, she began building the Deaf Clinic (since 1963: Nuffield Hearing and Speech Center ) at the Golden Square branch of the Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital and became its first director. The center is specially designed for the diagnosis, assessment and development of hearing and speech skills of deaf children.

By the 1950s, Whetnall became increasingly concerned about the problems of deaf children and focused her time and attention on young patients. Health problems forced her to withdraw from the otological surgery practice and to deal more with audiology, that is, the diagnosis and non-surgical treatment of hearing loss. Under her leadership, the Nuffield Center became known for the auditory-verbal method, which took a different approach than traditional signing (manual method) and lip-reading methods (oral education).

In 1939 she married the physician Robert Niven.

plant

Whetnall discovered that some children did better at school because their mothers regularly spoke in their ears. She assumed that all clinically deaf children had residual hearing that could be used with early diagnosis and adequate treatment. In her opinion, congenitally deaf babies should also be equipped with hearing aids in the first few months of life in order to give them the best chance for usable hearing and language skills.

In 1948 the new Medresco (Medical Research Council) hearing aids were introduced by the NHS. These made it possible to train the residual hearing loss of the children, which was found in the majority of children born deaf or those with early acquired hearing loss. Whetnall was for a time director of the MRC Wernher department, which was responsible for the development of Medresco hearing aids under Tom Littler.

As an otologist, she knew it would take more than surgery, and she encouraged the delivery of hearing aids and support programs like lip reading classes. It soon became clear that early diagnosis in congenital cases was the key to success. Whetnall and her team have had great success using hearing aids on toddlers and babies who suffered from profound sensorineural hearing loss, although experts believed that this was not possible.

Whetnall was one of the representatives of auditory-verbal education, with a focus more on residual hearing than on language. In spreading her new knowledge, she was attacked throughout her professional career by a vocal minority who campaigned for Deaf children to be allowed to develop in the Deaf culture. Although this controversy continued for several years, Whetnall's findings gained widespread support.

Her enthusiasm and ability to convince others of her treatment method led to other similar facilities in different parts of the UK and overseas. In 1953 a special clinic for mothers and babies was opened in Ealing , with a week of tests and intensive training for the mothers of deaf children. In 1958 a second clinic was opened in Ealing, where older children could stay for longer periods.

Whetnall's concept was based on the program of the Dutch doctor Henk Huizing, which he had introduced in Groningen , Netherlands in the early 1940s for children under 3 who were placed in normal speaking families instead of in the deaf school as before. Bengt Barr had started a similar program in Denmark :

  • A deaf child was provided with a hearing aid under the age of 3 if possible.
  • The Medesco hearing aid was given up by the state (NHS) and was the only one available, so everyone wore this hearing aid.
  • The microphone had to be placed in front of the child so that they could hear their own voice.
  • The hearing aids had to be worn all day so that the deaf child could hear the sounds for as many hours as the hearing children.
  • A normal speaking and linguistic environment was necessary because you can only reproduce what you hear.
  • Individual language training was required to teach the child to hear and interpret the sounds received through the hearing aid.
  • The child was not taught individual language elements , but rather the flow of speech and the language rhythm ( prosody , intonation, word melody , sentence accent , word accent ) of the language were established first, considering that 80% of language understanding is based on these two.
  • The aim was to acquire enough speaking and language skills by the time they started school to be able to attend school with their normal hearing peers.

She wrote numerous articles about her method and experiences for various newspapers and in 1964 a book on the auditory-verbal approach to training deaf children. It was important to her to train young otologists and other specialists in this field. One of her staunch students was the speech therapy teacher Ciwa Griffiths , who had independently had the same experience in America and had to assert herself there against the established professional world.

Publications

  • with Dennis Butler Fry: The Deaf Child . William Heinemann Medical Books, London 1964.
  • with Dennis Butler Fry, Robert B. Niven (Eds.): Learning to Hear . William Heinemann Medical Books, London 1970, ISBN 0433232501 .

literature

  • HA Beagley: Edith Whetnall's contribution to British audiology. In: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Volume 71, December 1978.
  • G. GOULD: A history of the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital 1974-1982. In: Journal of Laryngology and Otology, 1998, Suppl 22, 45-47.
  • Ciwa Griffiths: HEAR: A Four-Letter Word. Autobiography and History of Deaf Education. Wide Range Press 1991, ISBN 0963070908 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ciwa Griffiths: HEAR: A Four-Letter Word
personal data
SURNAME Whetnall, Edith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Whetnall, Edith Aileen Maude
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British otologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Hull , Yorkshire
DATE OF DEATH October 23, 1965
Place of death London