"Deafness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sufferer is tempted to eat what he knows from experience will disagree with him; a bitter coppery taste in the mouth, due to taurocholic acid—a common symptom of lithemia or of imperfect oxidation of albumen; emaciation, fatigue, depression, headache, buzzing in the ears and deafness, disturbance of sight, loss of memory, faintness and vertigo, very marked in some cases; sometimes tenderness and pain under the cartilages of the right ribs; the fretting of the sensitive surface of the bowels by imperfectly digested, semi-putrescent food, resulting ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... was thus occupied, the Caliph, who, instead of the visions he expected, had acquired in these insubstantial regions a voracious appetite, was greatly provoked at the negresses: for, having totally forgotten their deafness, he had impatiently asked them for food; and seeing them regardless of his demand, he began to cuff, pinch, and push them, till Carathis arrived to terminate a scene ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... will receive it so, that has fallen for the time—ugh, ugh, ugh—upon my lungs, and renders it a good deal troublesome to me to speak loud; so that the nearer you sit—and it has affected my head a little, only with a slight deafness, though, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, and wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her ears. In the secret tower of her deafness she sat apart, looking down at the world through sharply ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... be wished that the truth of the often repeated assertion that consanguineous marriages lead to deafness, and dumbness, blindness, etc., should be ascertained; and all such assertions could be easily tested by the returns ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder, we only need to focus upon you a ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... of curiosity, of surprise, of any sort of pronounced interest, began to arouse his distrust. But except for the felicitous pretence of deafness I had not tried to pretend anything. I had felt utterly incapable of playing the part of ignorance properly, and therefore was afraid to try. It is also certain that he had brought some ready-made suspicions with him, and that he viewed my politeness as a strange and unnatural phenomenon. ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... in the shape of customary gifts, so that the man that taketh the powders so sent, by tongue or skin, is, without doubt, speedily deprived of life. Women have sometimes caused dropsy and leprosy, decrepitude and impotence and idiocy and blindness and deafness in men. These wicked women, ever treading in the path of sin, do sometimes (by these means) injure their husbands. But the wife should never do the least injury to her lord. Hear now, O illustrious lady, of the behaviour I adopt towards the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... enjoyment of that interchange of thoughts by flying from topic to topic just as their unshackled imagination suggested. But Fernand never questioned Nisida concerning the motive which had induced her to feign dumbness and deafness for so many years; she had given him to understand that family reasons of the deepest importance, and involving dreadful mysteries from the contemplation of which she recoiled with horror, had prompted so tremendous a ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... never obtained the opportunity to relieve himself from the affliction with which he had afflicted others. Like an impostor who has established the claim of deafness, and mankind bawls in his ear, the hatted spectre was made to feel uncomfortable when he put off his tile—his consistency was at once on trial. He was like a boy who had pricked a cross upon his hand ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... dumb, the son of a poor clergyman, and had an extraordinary passion for botany. Every holiday was devoted to rambling about the country near London. He cared little for anything but his favourite science, but that he understood, and he never grew tired of it. I took no account of his deafness and dumbness; the one thing I saw was his mastership over a single subject. Gradually my incompleteness came to weigh on me like a nightmare. I imagined that if I had learned any craft which required skill, I should have been content. I was ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... all-round athletes in a New York club not long ago," said a physician, "three are dead of consumption, five have to wear trusses, four or five are lop-shouldered, and three have catarrh and partial deafness." Dr. Patten, chief surgeon at the National Soldiers' Home at Dayton, Ohio, says that "of the five thousand soldiers in that institution fully eighty per cent. are suffering from heart disease in one form or another, due ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... sq. in. Exposure to such pressures is apt to be followed by disagreeable and even dangerous physiological effects, which are commonly referred to as caisson disease or compressed air illness. The symptoms are of a very varied character, including pains in the muscles and joints (the "bends"), deafness, embarrassed breathing, vomiting, paralysis ("divers' palsy"), fainting and sometimes even sudden death. At the St Louis bridge, where a pressure was employed equal to 41/4 atmospheres, out of 600 workmen, 119 were affected and 14 died. At one ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him accused of it before. "Oh, yes," he said, "I am a little hard of hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... as he took it. Somehow he couldn't get used to her deafness, and expected her to give some evidence of surprise or curiosity. But she was still studying her hands, and as his eyes lingered on her downcast face he saw a tear well from her lids and wet the cheek she held partly turned from him. He wanted to kiss that tear, but refrained and ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... sometimes gave him the catch-word abruptly. I noticed the delicacy of Miss Ferrier on such occasions. Her sight was bad, and she took care not to use her glasses when he was speaking, and she affected also to be troubled with deafness, and would say, 'Well, I am getting as dull as a post, I have not heard a word since you said so and so,' being sure to mention a circumstance behind that at which he had really halted. He then took up the thread with his habitual smile of courtesy, as if forgetting his case entirely in ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... again, the most serious single cause of the most severe forms of brain disease and insanity, this often coming on many years after the infection, and when the early symptoms were but slight. Blindness and deafness from the beginning of life are in a large proportion of cases due to syphilis. There is, indeed, no organ of the body which is not liable to break down, often with fatal results, through syphilis, so that it has been well said ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... and every feature of her face in perfection." This was the Stella of Swift's after-life, the one woman to whom his whole love was given. But side by side with the slow growth of his knowledge of all she was for him, was the slow growth of his conviction that attacks of giddiness and deafness, which first came when he was twenty, and recurred at times throughout his life, were signs to be associated with that which he regarded as the curse upon his life. His end would be like his uncle Godwin's. ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... souls, and the land bordering it like a waste of dread; then the darkness swallowed both; and the thunder came so loud that it not only deafened but seemed to blind him beyond the darkness, that his brain turned to a lump of clay. Then came a silence, and the silence was like a deeper deafness. But from the deafness burst and trickled a faint doubtful stream: could it be a voice, calling, calling, from a great distance? Was he the fool of weariness and excitement, or did he actually hear his own name? Whose voice could it be but lady Arctura's, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... tone-deafness. Here was the kind of man she always had known existed. It was for some such man that she had waited. She was twenty-two, and her first marriage offer had come when she was sixteen. The last had occurred ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... in August, fearing the worst; but Stella rallied, and in the spring of 1727 he returned to London. In August, however, there came alarming news, when Swift was himself suffering from giddiness and deafness. To Dr. Sheridan he wrote that the last act of life was always a tragedy at best: "it is a bitter aggravation to have one's best friend go before one." Life was indifferent to him; if he recovered from his disorder it would only be ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... pure science. What sights I have seen! Men and women of all ages and walks of life testifying that the waters of the sacred grotto have freed them from this or that malady, from tumors, lameness, deafness, blindness, tuberculosis, nervous trouble and numerous other afflictions. By thousands and tens of thousands these unfortunates crowd here from the four corners of the earth, an endless procession of believers, and every year sees scores of the incurable cured, instantly cured—even ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... ring; The preacher said, with trumpet voice: "Let all the people sing!" The tune was "Coronation," and the music upward rolled, Till I thought I heard the angels striking all their harps of gold. My deafness seemed to melt away; my spirit caught the fire; I joined my feeble, trembling voice with that melodious choir, And sang as in my youthful days: "Let angels prostrate fall; Bring forth the royal diadem, and crown him Lord of all." I ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... a frequent cause of both slight and aggravated deafness. Of 156 deaf mutes examined 59 per cent had adenoids, while only 6 per cent of the general run of the children in the neighborhood had this trouble. In mouth breathing, the current of air entering the mouth ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... served us most charmingly under the eagle eye of Miss Jencks, eating, herself, like a hungry school-girl, and stealing Roger's cakes impudently when the sometime directress of the Governor-General's household affected a well-bred deafness to her request for more. After tea Miss Jencks departed with her knitting and we three were comfortably silent; Margarita dreamy, I all in a maze at her, Roger relishing my wonder. The hyacinths smelled strong ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... while by a set of intelligent young men, with mustache, who smoke bad cigars, and cultivate as elsewhere the charm of each others' classical conversation. Montaigne was here in the 15th century, and Fallopius, he of the trumpets, came here to be cured of deafness—which is one of the infirmities which the Latin inscription declares to have yielded to the use of the waters. Lorenzo di Medici came to talk platonism and the fine arts at a place which will never know either any more; and, from a Latin letter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... large paper, and many other fine books. It was also rich in natural science, topography, and antiquities. Dibdin describes her as 'at the head of all the female collectors of Europe.' Miss Currer, who suffered from deafness, was an intimate friend of Richard Heber, and it was rumoured at one time that this distinguished bibliomaniac was engaged to be married to Miss Currer, but the event did not transpire. Miss Currer's books were sold at Sotheby's in July and August, 1862, and realized nearly ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... His sons were not of the party; and as the persons of the strangers were unknown, and the guise of a militia-man was often assumed by Fagan, our friend was not 'easy in his mind how to act.' His first idea was to feign deafness; but a second knock, loud enough to wake all but the dead, changed his intention—he raised the ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... from much grief, from study and perturbation of the brain: I have read the cause of his effects in Galen: it is a kind of deafness. ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... could not pray: so took The darkened stair, where his feet shook A sad blind echo. He kept up Slowly. 'Twas a chill sway of air That autumn noon within the stair, Sick, dizzy, like a turning cup. His brain perplexed him, void and thin: He shut his eyes and felt it spin; The obscure deafness hemmed him in. He said: ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... have made his name immortal in music. Mozart composed his great operas, and last of all his "Requiem," when oppressed by debt and struggling with a fatal disease. Beethoven produced his greatest works amidst gloomy sorrow, when oppressed by almost total deafness. ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... comparison with other children, is determined, not by himself, but by his Creator, and depends, probably, upon conditions of organization in his cerebral system as much beyond his control as any thing abnormal in the features of his face, or blindness, or deafness, or any other physical disadvantage. The child who shows any indications of inferiority to others in any of these respects should be the object of his parent's or his teacher's special tenderness and care. If he is ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... be proud of smelling musk and lavender, but let him tell you by a quiver of the nostrils the various kinds of so-called scentless flowers, and let him bend his ear and interpret secrets that the universe is ever whispering to us who are pent in partial deafness ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... personality that I had my hand back of my ear too, and spoke in a low, slightly drawling nasal, like his—"Allison," I repeated, "don't you miss a great deal by being deaf?" Now, it is said with tender regret, but a deep and sincere regard for truth, that my friend makes a virtue of a slight deafness. He uses it to avoid arguments, assignments, conventions, parlor parties—and bores—and deftly evades a whole lot of "duty" conversations as well. Of course I know all this now, but in those days I thought his lack of complete hearing an infirmity calling for ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... of Columbia George's Honduras Sarsaparilla East India Hair Dye, colors the hair and not the skin Acoustic Oil, for deafness Vermifuge Bartholomew's Expectorant Syrup Carlton's Specific Cure for Ringbone, Spavin and Wind-galls Dr. Sphon's Head Ache Remedy Dr. Connol's Gonorrhea Mixture Mother's Relief Nipple Salve Roach and Bed Bug Bane Spread Plasters Judson's Cherry and ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... be steeped for twenty-one days in olive oil whilst exposed to the sunlight, this makes an admirable bactericide; also by simply instilling a few drops two or three times a day into the ear, all pain therein, or discharges therefrom, and consequent deafness, will be effectually cured, as well as any itching eczema of the external ear and its canal. A conserve of the flowers is employed on the Continent against ringworm. Some of the most brilliant results have been obtained in suppurative ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... after I called and saw Mrs. Carlyle I got a violent cold, which (being neglected) flew to my Ears, and settled into such a Deafness I couldn't hear the Postman knock nor the Omnibus roll. When I began (after more than a Month) to begin recovering of this (though still so deaf as to determine not to be a Bore to any one else) I heard from Bedford that my poor W. Browne (who got you a Horse some fifteen years ago) had been ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... What with old Sally's deafness, and the increasing thickness of the air, in which the two old figures were dimly seen as through a woolly veil, conversation was really impossible. There were many questions Maisie would have liked to ask about the kitten's ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... has its disadvantages when such a conflict is provoked as that with Mr. Chamberlain on the article in the Daily News. Mr. Gladstone himself spoke of the consolations of old age; there is one consolation he did not mention. His absorption in the Bill and the slight deafness in one of his ears do not allow him to perceive so plainly the rude noises and interruptions by which he is often assailed from the Tory Benches. Moreover, the native chivalry of his disposition, the curious ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... birth, was placed in a pen under violet glass. In twenty-four hours it was able to walk and became quite animated. By the same method a mule was reported to have been cured of obstinate rheumatism and deafness. Again, a canary-bird, which had been an exceptionally fine warbler, declined to eat or sing, and appeared to be in a feeble state of health. The bird in its cage was placed in the bath-room of its owner's dwelling, the windows ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... my dear, afore I turned to my prayers at my bedside, coming down the street without his rider. He came like a rumble of deafness in my ears. Oh, my boy, I thought, Is it Robert's horse?—knowing you've got enemies, as there's no brave man has not got 'em—which is our only hope in the God ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nervously toying with some curiosities upon it. He was, as usual, dressed with great care, and his face, though white and worn from the effects of agitation of mind, looked if anything handsomer than ever. As soon as he heard them coming, which owing to his partial deafness he did not do till they were quite close to him, he turned round with a start, and a sudden flush of colour came upon his ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... men, in their bills, do give an account of the persons cured, and the diseases removed, so could I give you account of numberless numbers that have not only been made to live, but to live forever, by drinking this pure water of life. No disease comes amiss to it. It cures blindness, deafness, dumbness, deadness. This right holy water (all other is counterfeit) will drive away evil spirits. It will make you have a white soul, and that is better than a white skin.'—(Bunyan's Water of Life). Whoever ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... he meant, but 'is deafness come on ag'in. Henery Walker 'ad an extra dose o' gin put in, and arter he 'ad tasted it the old gentleman seemed to get more amiable-like, and 'im and Henery Walker sat by ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... study of great works of art. With what vigor and faithfulness this labor was pursued, the Roman and Venetian note-books testify. "For the studies he made from Raphael," writes Leslie, "he paid dearly; for he caught so severe a cold in the chambers of the Vatican as to occasion a deafness which obliged him to use an ear-trumpet for the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... nothing of that sort, but rather the external suffering that my unfortunate little head received at the hands of nurses, who half-suffocated me with the soap that produced temporary blindness in my eyes, and deafness in my ears, before the best family yellow or mottled was "slooshed" away, leaving me panting and hot. Then came the tremendous rubbing, followed by the jigging out of knots of hair with a cruel comb and the ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... DORMER STANHOPE, EARL OF, statesman, orator, and man of letters, eldest son of the third earl, born in London; sat in the House of Commons from 1716 to 1726; was an opponent of Walpole; held office under the Pelhams; in 1748 retired from deafness, or perhaps disgust, into private life; celebrated for his "Letters to his Son," models of elegance, though of questionable morality, which it appears he never intended to publish, and for the scorn with which Dr. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... own confession it was only the prospect of her comforts that prevented him from laying violent hands on himself. Read his words and you shall find that it was his art that was his companion in his wanderings through field and forest, the sharer of the solitude to which his deafness condemned him. The concepts Nature and Art were intimately bound up in his mind. His lofty and idealistic conception of art led him to proclaim the purity of his goddess with the hot zeal of a priestly fanatic. Every form of pseudo ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... the mighty figure. And so Beethoven, an artist of the same colossal order, wrote out for us those mysterious harmonies which his ear had for the first time heard; and which, in his mournful old age, it heard none the less plainly because of its complete physical deafness. And in this way Shakespeare wrote his "Othello"; spinning out no abstract thoughts about jealousy and its fearful effects upon a proud and ardent nature, but revealing to us the living concrete man, as his imperial ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... man from the East alighted on the platform of the railway station, north of the town, and, entering the rickety omnibus that lingered there, seeking whom it might rattle to deafness, demanded to be driven to the Herald Building. It did not strike the driver that the newcomer was precisely a gay young man when he climbed into the omnibus; but, an hour later, as he stood in the doorway of the edifice he had indicated as his destination, depression seemed to have settled ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... will dismount all guns, and strike them into the hold. The reasons for this action will be at once apparent to commanders of vessels, when they reflect that, in case of collision, the guns would be useless as signals, owing to the extraordinary deafness of the officers belonging to the Peninsular and Oriental Mail Steamship Company; and a reference to the details of the Oneida's disaster will show the danger of the guns breaking loose and destroying human life. They will, therefore, be at once ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... said that I am in the habit of taking quinine as a stimulant; that I have depended upon the excitement it produces in writing my verses, and that, in consequence of using it in that way, I had become as deaf as a post. As to my deafness, you know that to be false, and the rest of the story is equally so. I abominate all drugs and narcotics, and have always carefully avoided every thing which spurs nature to exertions which it would not otherwise ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... the floor, and Adams secured, he instantly laid hold on Fanny, and, with the assistance of the poet and player, who, hearing the battle was over, were now come up, dragged her, crying and tearing her hair, from the sight of her Joseph, and, with a perfect deafness to all her entreaties, carried her downstairs by violence, and fastened her on the player's horse; and the captain, mounting his own, and leading that on which this poor miserable wretch was, departed, without any more consideration of her ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... death, if not in terrible difficulties; he determined, under the circumstances, to make himself as disagreeable as possible to all parties. With this amiable resolution he adopted a physical infirmity in the shape of deafness. In reality, no one was more acute in hearing, but as there are no bells where there are no houses, he of course could not answer such a summons, and he was compelled to attend to the call of his own name—"Mahomet! Mahomet!" No reply, although ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... electing representative peers robs us of even that modicum of democratic peers of Parliament which Great Britain is able to secure, and we repeat the argument of Mr. Gladstone that the distance of Dublin from Westminster and the consequent deafness of the House of Commons to Irish opinion is to a slight extent redressed by the small excess—calculated on lines of proportion—which Irish ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... of scrofula. 2. Chronic cutaneous affections, especially of the scalp. 3. Severe injuries of the bones of the head; convulsions. 4. Impaired vision, from whatever cause; inflammatory affections of the eyelids; immobility or irregularity of the iris; fistula, lachrymalis, etc., etc. 5. Deafness; copious discharge from the ears. 6. Loss of many teeth, or the teeth generally unsound. 7. Impediment of speech. 8. Want of due capacity of the chest, and any other indication of a liability to a pulmonic disease. 9. Impaired or inadequate efficiency ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... easier than another would give a penny, when he's in the humour. But his humour is very odd, and there's no knowing where to have him; he's cross-grained, and more positiver-like than a mule; and his deafness made him worse in this, because he never heard what nobody said, but would say on his own way—he was very odd, but not cracked—no, he was as clear-headed, when he took a thing the right way, as any man could be, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... Blindness, then deafness possessed him. Stupefied, instinct still aided him automatically in his customary habit of fighting; he strove to beat back the mounting waves of lethargy; half-conscious, ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... Miss Dyer means to be very neighborly." The director turned, with a smile, to include that lady in the conversation. But the local deafness had engulfed her. She was sitting peacefully by the window, with the air of one retired within herself, to think her own very remote thoughts. The visitor mentally improvised a little theory, and it seemed to fit the occasion. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... rate, in his past had turned him into a silent, brooding man, seldom coming out of his thoughts until it came to a bargain, when he woke up like a giant from sleep. His deafness helped to fasten this silent habit deeper upon him. Also he was touchy about his deafness: didn't like at any time to be reminded of it; and was apt to fly into a sudden rage if anyone brought up a reminder, even by a chance hint. And that, belike, was the main reason why he alone on board—barring ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fresh mysteries, or about the arrival of the Messiah. But if you began to speak to him about distilleries, taxes, estates, and things in connection with them, he would open his eyes widely and would listen to you like a man struck with deafness, because these things are to him like a sealed letter. For him, beyond his sacred books, the world is like ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... in Glasgow, and his son in due time entered the High School there. In after-years his schoolmates remembered him as a very clever, but hardly a diligent boy. Though frequently absent from illness (one of these childish maladies caused the deafness in one ear from which he suffered), he always kept his place at the head of his class. "He never seemed to learn anything when the class was sitting down," wrote a fellow-pupil, "and on returning after one of his ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... admirer of truth. An illustration may be given. When afflicted by deafness he consulted a celebrated aurist, who, after trying all remedies in vain, determined, as a last resource, to inject into the ear a strong solution of caustic. It caused the most intense pain, but the patient bore it ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... among children, though rarer with girls than boys, she went one day into the kitchen for the carving-knife, that she might cut her throat; luckily the servants were at dinner, and the child retreated. Deafness, which proved incurable, began to afflict her before she was sixteen. A severe, harsh, and mournful kind of religiosity seized her, and this 'abominable spiritual rigidity,' as she calls it, confirmed all the gloomy predispositions of her mind. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... this complication. The disease of the kidneys usually results in recovery, but occasionally in death or in chronic Bright's disease of these organs. Inflammation of the middle ear with abscess, discharge of matter from the ear externally, and—as the final outcome—deafness, is not uncommon. This complication may be prevented to a considerable extent by spraying the nose and throat frequently and by the patient's use of a nightcap with earlaps, if the room is not sufficiently warm. Inflammation of the eyelids ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... likewise; then each of them pretended to believe that the other was making fun of him, and there followed a stuttering quarrel between the two parties, each one finding it more and more difficult to express himself as his anger rose. Thiemet, who besides his role of stammering was also playing that of deafness, addressed his neighbor, his trumpet ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... probably of the semicircular canals, characterized by nausea, vomiting, vertigo, deafness, tinnitus aurium, and various other phenomena. It is also called aural or auditory vertigo. The salient symptom is vertigo, and this varies somewhat in degree according to the portions of the ear affected. If the disease ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... was Treitshke, eminent also as a member of parliament—a man who exercised great power in various directions, and would have been delightful but for his deafness. A pistol might have been fired beside him, and he would never have known it. Wherever he was, he had with him a block of paper leaves and a pencil, by means of which he carried on conversation; in parliament he always had ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Deafness even has its compensations. Thus this old couple had not been kept awake all night by the ringing of bells and the firing of small cannon, which had continued incessantly since the setting of the sun had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... frontal eminences unduly prominent; the bridge of the nose sunken and rounded; radiating scars at the angles of the mouth; perforation or destruction of the hard palate; Hutchinson's teeth; opacities of the cornea from antecedent keratitis; alterations in the fundus oculi from choroiditis; deafness; depressed scars or nodes on the bones from previous gummata; "sabre-blade" or other deformity of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... to Jean a lapse of time sufficient to impress him with a possible deafness of these men, the ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... and Ben Yolland would even then have given it to him, but before it could be arranged, he could no longer swallow, and the affection of the brain was fast blocking up the senses, so that blindness and deafness came on, and passed into that insensibility in which the last struggles of life are, as they tell us, rather agonising to the beholder than to the sufferer. It was at sundown at last that the mightiest and gentlest spirit I ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... either of body, mind, or fortune, which as they wound the soul of man, produce this melancholy, and many great inconveniences, by that antidote of good counsel and persuasion may be eased or expelled. Deformities and imperfections of our bodies, as lameness, crookedness, deafness, blindness, be they innate or accidental, torture many men: yet this may comfort them, that those imperfections of the body do not a whit blemish the soul, or hinder the operations of it, but rather help and much increase it. Thou art lame of body, deformed to the eye, yet this ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... fields of grain that waved like a golden lake—but there were few farmhouses. In all the afternoon I passed but one person, a deaf man who asked for direction. When I cried out that I was a stranger, he held his hand to his ear, but his mouth fell open as if my words, denied by deafness from a proper portal, were offered here a service entrance. I spread my map before him and he put an ample thumb upon it. Then inquiring whether I had crossed a road with a red house upon it where his friend resided, he thanked ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... Deafness, dumbness, short-sightedness, tertiary or quaternary ague, gout, epilepsy, polyp, varicose veins, a breath indicating an internal malady, sterility among the women—such were the grounds accepted for complete abrogation of the contract. As to moral defects, nothing was said. Nevertheless, ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... to give up the deacon and try Rev. Dr. Dox. When he called at the parsonage, the doctor came down into the parlor. Because of the doctor's deafness there was a little ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... dishevelled by reason of the various huggings she had undergone from sundry bridesmaids and sympathetic female friends, chief among whom was a certain Mrs Crowder, who in virtue of her affection for the McLeod family, her age, and her deafness, had constituted herself a compound of mother and grandmamma to Flora. The gig was fitted to hold only two. When Flora was seated, Reginald Redding—also somewhat dishevelled owing to the hearty, not to say violent, congratulations of ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... Cats deaf?—White cats are reputed to be "hard of hearing." I have known many instances, and in all stupidity seemed to accompany the deafness. Can any instances be given of white cats possessing the function of hearing ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... too surely, on the deafness of his old housekeeper, and had also heavily discounted her personal interest in his pursuits and her tendency to gossip. Yet, through this single channel had been disseminated information and conjecture which made it difficult ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... Missionaries in their writings have alleged that the inhabitants of Atures and Maypures have been struck with deafness by the noise of the Great Cataracts, but this is untrue. When the noise is heard in the plain that surrounds the mission, at the distance of more than a league, you seem to be near a coast skirted by reefs and breakers. The noise is three times as loud by night ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... of the Arrowhead, had lately attended an evening affair in the valley at which the hitherto smart tipple of Jamaica ginger had been supplanted by a novel and potent beverage, Nature's own remedy for chills, dyspepsia, deafness, rheumatism, despair, carbuncles, jaundice, and ennui. Laura had partaken freely and yet again of this delectable brew, and now suffered not only from a sprained wrist but from detention, having suffered arrest on complaint ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... the Beasts along, By sweet Rhetorick of his learned Tongue, 'Twas deafness made the Adder sin; and this Caus'd him, who should have ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... bien.' The following is more recent, but the humor of it hardly less arch or less refined. The celebrity of M. de Chateaubriand, the vainest of mortals, was on the wane. About the same time, it happened to be casually mentioned in conversation that Chateaubriand was affected with deafness, and complained bitterly of that infirmity. 'Je compends,' said Talleyrand; 'dequis qu'on a cesse de parler de ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... I don't complain for myself of an unappreciating public—I have no reason. But, just for that reason, I complain more about Robert, only he does not hear me complain. To you I may say, that the blindness, deafness, and stupidity of the English public to Robert are amazing. Of course Milsand had 'heard his name'! Well, the contrary would have been strange. Robert is. All England can't prevent his existence, I suppose. But nobody there, except a small knot of pre-Raffaelite ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... of correlation was singularly incomplete. As examples of correlation he advanced such trivial cases as the relation between albinism, deafness and blue eyes in cats, or between the tortoise-shell colour and the female sex. He used the word only in connection with what he called "correlated variation," meaning by this expression "that the whole organisation is so tied together during ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... Nature self-existent, it is much more difficult to believe some self-existent Super-nature, capable of producing it. In their anxiety to get rid of a natural difficulty, they invent a supernatural one, and accuse Atheists of 'wilful blindness,' and 'obstinate deafness,' for not choosing so unphilosophic a mode of explaining universal mystery. Call upon them to define their 'all-creative Deity,' and they know not what to answer. Ask them who, what, or where He is, and at once you have them on the hip; at once you spy their utter ignorance, ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... however, one of the many who learn to curb the impulse of a charitable intention. She looked out of the window, and pretended not to notice that the culprit had addressed his remark to her. To complete this convenient deafness she gave a simulated little cough of abstraction, which ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... fancied. The boat was already nearing the next landing where Alfaretta must go ashore, or be carried on to a much greater distance from her home, but it seemed difficult to make Miss Greatorex understand what was wanted and why. The poor lady's deafness had increased since her fright and exposure at the time of the fire and, now that she had been put into a position of greater trust than ever before, her sense of responsibility weighed heavily upon her. At parting, her ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... disturbance, and gaining great room for reflection. And now when the sound of a gun from the sea hung shaking in the web of vapour, each of these wise men gazed steadfastly at the rest, to see his own conclusion reflected, or concluded. A gun it was indeed—a big well-shotted gun, and no deafness could throw any doubt on it. There might not be anything to see, but still there would be plenty to hear at the headland—a sound more arousing than the parson's voice, a roar beyond that of all the gallery. "'Tis a battle!" said one, and his neighbour cried, "A rare one!" They turned to the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... absolutely "foot loose" and tied down to no duties in America, so no one could blame her for marrying an Irishman. She had never loved any one else, and Dr. La Touche might have had that information for the asking; but he was such a bat for blindness, adder for deafness, and lamb for meekness that because she refused him once, when she was the only comfort of an aged mother and father, he concluded that she would refuse him again, though she was now alone in the world. His late ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... incident that Edison acquired the deafness that has persisted all through his life, a severe box on the ears from the scorched and angry conductor being the direct cause of the infirmity. Although this deafness would be regarded as a great affliction by most people, and has brought in its train other serious baubles, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... swallowing. In health there is no communication between the chamber of the middle ear and the outside, except by the Eustachian tube. Thus a throat cold, with redness and swelling of the mucous membrane, is usually accompanied with some degree of deafness, because the swelling may block the lumen of the tube, and thus prevent the free passage of air ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... travelled little by sea, I know that on board ship, especially on a small boat like this, voices carry in an extraordinary manner. Standing down wind of you, on deck, some moments ago, I heard your remarks quite distinctly, in spite of my deafness. I even recognized your voices—until then I did not ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... and extraordinary in her look, as well as I could discern by the imperfect light of the apartment. I put a few unimportant questions to her, to which she replied, but seemed to be afflicted to a slight degree with deafness. Her hair was becoming grey, and I said that I believed she was older than myself, but that I was confident she had ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... his voice, as she set about her dressing. He was in his private office, talking with a patient whose deafness caused him to raise his own tones considerably; the closed door between could not keep out all the sound. She felt her invasion of his life more keenly than ever as she realized afresh how close to him her own life was to be lived. Marrying a village doctor, whose home contained also ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... a great nuisance, deafness in a gardener. But I love my work. I try to do it well," he ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... best Brigadiers in South Africa. They stood on my right hand and on my left all the way between Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and I never quite made up my mind as to which was the better. Bruce is a fighting man with an iron frame, and, in Gallipoli, his chief crab, his deafness, will be rather ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... bewilderment, but that luckily his master stood there too. The man's look of appeal was comical, going from one to another. Rollo was looking at girths and buckles, and did not seem to hear. Wych Hazel waited—a slight growing doubt on the subject of his deafness not increasing the pliability of her mood. Then he came towards her, and asked if she ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... finger alphabet," he said, "it would be of no use. I have been too miserable to learn it—my deafness only came on me a little more than a year since. Pardon me if I am obliged to give you trouble—I ask persons who pity me to write their answers when I speak to them. Come to my room, and you will find what you want—a ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... vanity. Before he left Ireland he contracted a disorder, as he thought, by eating too much fruit. The original of diseases is commonly obscure. Almost everybody eats as much fruit as he can get, without any great inconvenience. The disease of Swift was giddiness with deafness, which attacked him from time to time, began very early, pursued him through life, and at last sent him to the grave, deprived of reason. Being much oppressed at Moor Park by this grievous malady, he was advised to try his native air, and went to Ireland; but finding no benefit, returned ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... defect; but the nature of the defect is different in different cases. Deaf-mutism is so varied that frequently two unrelated deaf mutes may have hearing children. But if the deaf-mute parents are cousins, the chances that the deafness is due to the same unit defect are increased and all of the children ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... there was a crowd at the "ladies' department," that is, the dry-goods and finery, where it happened Lincoln was commonly besieged, the language was resented by woman's weapons—tosses of the head, affected deafness, glances into the future, and so on, but the clerk resented it in another way. He bade ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... were about to take the fatal plunge, was irresistibly comic, and was the more remarkable for the spontaneousness of the whole thing and the admirable way in which the pair played into one another's hands. The deaf one even played his deafness, making it worse than it was so as to heighten the comedy. By and by we came to a stile which they pretended to have a delicacy in crossing, but the lady helped them over. We concluded that if these young men were ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... already; who looks as pale as if she was staring to-day at the very Indians you name, when I was forced to speak to her through the rifle, because I couldn't reach her ears with my tongue. How was it, Nell! you have never given the reason of your deafness?" ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... than others to certain infirmities; the Gascons are given to exaggeration and Parisians to vanity. As we see that apoplexy attacks people with short necks, or butchers are liable to carbuncle, as gout attacks the rich, health the poor, deafness kings, paralysis administrators, so it has been remarked that certain classes of husbands and their wives are more given to illegitimate passions. Thus they forestall the celibates, they form another sort of aristocracy. If any reader ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... up beside me, her hands in her lap, and her great eyes fix'd most dolefully. And when Captain Billy came down with news that we were safe and free to go on deck, we turn'd our faces from him, and said we thank'd him kindly, but had no longer any wish that way—too wretched, even, to remember his deafness. ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... of the tonsils occasions deafness from pressure on the passage leading to the internal ear, and is also apt to give rise to a troublesome hacking cough which sometimes excites apprehension lest the child's lungs should be diseased. When still more considerable the enlarged tonsils ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... cigars, little dreaming what their comrade had on hand. One of them, the chief of my squadron, caught sight of me in the lamplight, and came shouting after me into the street. I hurried on, however, pretending not to hear him, so he, with a curse at my deafness, went back at last to his ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... child's experience of life had been hard enough. When only eight years of age he ran away to Portsmouth, and shipped himself on board a ship bound to Madeira. But he found his new life harder than that from which he had escaped, and, by dint of feigning deafness and lameness, he succeeded in procuring his removal to an hospital at Madeira, whence, the doctors finding his case yielded to no remedies, the authorities kindly shipped him again to England. He insisted on being deaf and lame: indeed, so deaf that in a violent thunder-storm he remained ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... to a party at the house of a neighbor, where, only a few weeks earlier, a baby had been added to the family. On the editor's arrival at the house, he was met at the door by his hostess, a woman who suffered to some extent from deafness. After the usual exchange of greetings, the editor inquired concerning the health of the baby. The hostess had a severe cold, and she now misunderstood the visitor's inquiry concerning the baby, thinking that he was solicitous ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... religious instruction. No attempt is made here, as in England, to teach them to articulate, as he considered the attempt to do this to be a great mistake, it being a painful effort to the child, which never leads to any good practical result. In some cases where deafness has been accidentally brought on after children have learned to speak, it is then as far as possible kept up; but even then the effort, as ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... trades. The taciturn storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom; he knows very well when they mean to buy and when they do not; and they equally wary ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... is obvious. Persons suffering with serious congenital defects, as natural blindness, deafness, deformity of the limbs, or defective development of any part, will be more or less likely to transmit the same deformities or deficiencies to their children. There are, of course, cases of natural blindness, as well as of disability in other respects, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... this splendor, suddenly I heard a shriek. Shrill, ringing midst the woods In piercing clearness, through my ears it cut, And left a sense of deafness. Startled, round I gazed. Again the horrid sound thrilled past. I knew it then as the terrific cry Of the fierce, bloody panther. In our woods Naught fiercer, bloodier dwells, when roused by rage Or hunger. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various |
